6.4 DISCUSSION FORUMS AND GROUPS
Discussion Forums are online communities of people with similar interests.
Members of a forum can communicate, discuss, share and comment on an idea
through messages. There are many forums available on the net, each dedicated to
a specific subject, like karate, travel, gardening, cooking, vintage cars, Photoshop,
aviation, laser eye surgery, etc. Anyone can register on the forum website and
become a member of the forum. Registering gives you the opportunity to
contribute your ideas and share your views with other members. Some examples
of discussion forum websites are karateforums.com, photoshopforums.com and
discussions.hardwarecentral.com.
Each discussion forum has a group of community users who are knowledgeable
about the subject matter. These users are called moderators who are responsible
for the quality and effectiveness of the discussions. They keep the discussions fresh and clean by starting new topics and removing inappropriate content. Any
new topic in the forum is called a „Thread’ and all the messages associated with a
thread are called „Posts‟.
Discussion Groups like Google Groups or Yahoo Groups are based on the
concept of mailing list. You create and see the threads using e-mail and only
people who are subscribed to that group are able to see the threads (e-mails).
Unlike discussion forum, a discussion group does not need any additional
hardware or software for its set up. We will study setting up and using a
discussion group in detail, taking Yahoo Groups as our example.
6.4.1 Creating a Yahoo Group
1. Go to http://in.groups.yahoo.com/. You get the screen as above2. Click on the link „Start your group‟. If you already have a Yahoo Id then login
using that, else click on the „Create New Account‟ button. Enter all the details
asked for and a new Yahoo Id will be created for you.
3. Select the category for the Group you want to create. For this you need to be
sure of the purpose of your group. Since we will be creating a community of
BCA students, we select „Schools and Education‟ and then „classmates‟ on the
next page.
4. Click on „Place my group here‟ on the next page.
5. We will give the name and email address for our group on the next page.
Since this group is for all BCA students at centre A, we will name it as
„BCA CenterA‟ for our purpose. We will give „BCA CenterA‟ for the email
address too. You may give any name and address as per your requirements.
Click „Continue‟ button to go to the next screen.
6. Once the group is created you see the following details on the screen:
Group name: BCACenterA
Group home page: http://in.groups.yahoo.com/group/BCACenterA
Group email: BCACenterA@yahoogroups.co.in
7. Now you can customize your group and define who all can join the group or
post messages, whether or not messages are archived, whether or not to list
your group in Yahoo! Groups directory or whether an approval is required to
join the group, etc. You can also invite your friends and other people to join
the group. The creator of the group becomes the moderator by default. The
moderator could define on how the group should be used, add or remove
people from the group, etc.
6.4.2 Joining a Yahoo Group
There are two ways that you can join a group:
1. Search for the group in Yahoo groups. Login using your Id and then send a
request to join the group. Once your request is approved by the moderator,
you become the member.
2. The second way is that you receive the invite to join the group and then you
join the group.
6.4.3 Posting a message
Once you are a member of a group, you can login to the group and post a
message. All the members of the group will receive an email about your post and
anybody can reply to that post.
You can reply to a post by one of the following two ways:
- Reply to the email received.
- Post a reply to the original message in the group interface.
