This document discusses the history and features of internet forums. It begins by explaining how forums originated from bulletin boards and early online discussion sites. It then covers key aspects of forums like their hierarchical structure, user permissions, and moderation. The document also compares forums to other social media, noting forums allow more control over content. It concludes by providing an overview of Invision Power Board, a popular forum software.

1. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Invision power.
Visual design of Forum. Demo
Milan Milošević
Department of Physics
Faculty of Sciences and Mathematics
University of Niš, Serbia
ERASMUS+ Project NETCHEM: ICT Networking for Overcoming Technical and Social
Barriers in Instrumental Analytical Chemistry Education
Work Meeting, 3 - 6 September 2018, Brno University of Technology, Brno, Czech Republic

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This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
What is a forum?
• A forum ("public place outdoors")
was a public square in a Roman
towns, reserved primarily for the
vending of goods; i.e., a marketplace, along
with the buildings used for shops.
• a forum was a gathering place of great social
significance, and often the scene of diverse
activities, including political discussions and
debates, rendezvous, meetings etc.
• An Internet forum, or message board
• An online discussion site where people can hold
conversations in the form of posted messages.
Photo:ForumofPompeii,seenfromabovetheBasilicawithadrone;ElfQrin/Wikimedia

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This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
The Internet forum
• Forums are not chat rooms.
• Messages are often longer than one line of
text, and are at least temporarily archived.
• Different access levels, sometimes a posted
message have to be approved by moderator
before it becomes public.
• Users can be anonymous or have to register
with the forum and then subsequently log
in in order to post messages. On most
forums, users do not have to log in to read
existing messages.

4. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Origins
• Originated from bulletin boards, and so-called
computer conferencing systems, and are a
technological evolution of the dialup Bulletin Board
System (BBS).
• Precursor: Berkley, California (1973)
• The 1st BBS: Chicago, 16 February 1978.
http://bbsindex.de/index.php?news=42
https://www.engadget.com/2012/04/14/bbs-version-of-google/

5. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Origings II
• Early Internet forums could be described as a
web version of an electronic mailing list or
newsgroup (Usenet); allowing people to post
messages and comment on other messages.
• Later developments emulated
the different newsgroups or
individual lists, providing more
than one forum, dedicated to
a particular topic.
https://www.briskbard.com

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This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Web 1.0 -> Web 2.0
• Transition 1.0 to 2.0: 1999 - 2006
• Web 1.0: static pages, website content in files,
combination of content and layout/style,
guestbooks, e-mailing of forms (read-only web)
• Web 2.0: user-generated content, an emphasis on
user experience (web applications are responsive to
user input), the first websites with APIs (Application
Programming Interfaces) (read-write)
• Web 3.0: minimalist designs, ever-present web,
semantic web (data readable by computers and
humans), AI (read-write-execute)
Next phase: Internet of Things (IoT)
• Servers were upgraded, average connection speeds
increased, and developers learned new skills and
techniques.

7. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

8. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
What is Internet Forum?
• A tree-like directory structure (like folders on a
computer)
• Divided into categories for the relevant
discussions
• Sub-forums
more sub-forums…
topics (commonly called threads)
– Members can start discussion / post

9. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

10. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
http://forum.astronomija.org.rs

11. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
http://forum.astronomija.org.rs

12. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
http://forum.astronomija.org.rs

13. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Past, Present, Future?
• Past: the best part of Internet
• Now: blogs, social networks, etc.
• Future: ???

14. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Adventages?
• Blogs and Social networks
• There is no moderators, there is no control
• Fake news & “science” – spreads faster than
truth:
To understand how false news spreads, Vosoughi et al. used a data set
of rumour cascades on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. About 126,000
rumours were spread by ∼3 million people. False news reached more
people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to
between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to
more than 1000 people.
• Internet forums:
• Moderators and administrators can control the
content!
S. Vosoughi, D. Roy, S.Ara, Science, Vol. 359, Issue 6380, pp. 1146-1151 DOI: 10.1126/science.aap9559

15. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Discussion
• Prefer a premise of open and free discussion
• Most common topics: questions, comparisons, polls of
opinion, debates
• Not uncommon for nonsense or unsocial behaviour to
sprout as people lose temper, especially if the topic is
controversial
• Common problems: poor understanding of differences in
values of the participants; replies to a topic are often
worded aimed at someone's point of view, discussion
usually go slightly off-topic as people question each other's
validity, sources and so on.
• In many countries: “no provider or user of an interactive
computer service shall be treated as the publisher or
speaker of any information provided by another
information content provider.” USA: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

16. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Invision Power Board (IPB)
• Forums are powered by many different
software (most of them are free, some more complex
solutions are proprietary)
• Produced by Invision Power Services,
Inc. It is written in PHP and uses MySQL as
a database management system.
• Invision Community (Suite) – originated
from IPB
• IPB can be bought as separate application
• Most of other applications depends in IPB

17. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Invision Power Board (IPB)
• Created in 2002 by Charles Warner and Matt
Mecham
• Ver 1.x.x – free, under proprietary licence; changed
after 1.3 – still in use!
1.3A New license allowed free of charge use for evaluation
purposes only
1.3 - Many exploits have been found, but many patches have
been produced by the community
• Ver 2.x.x – same licence as 1.3A; in 2004 ended free
releases for non-commercial uses
2.0.1 update: the free downloads were replaced with a free demo
with restrictions of 5000 posts, 1000 threads, 200 members and
other restrictions, thus ending its claims that Invision Power Board
would be free forever
Since July 2005 – 5 days demo
• Now: ver. 4.x.x, since May 2012

18. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
DEMO
• URL:
• http://c122975.try.invisionpower.com
• Admin URL:
• http://c122975.try.invisionpower.com/admin
• Username: admin
• Password: ….

19. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Thank you for your attention ☺
Milan Milošević
Department of Physics
Faculty of Sciences and Mathematics
University of Niš, Serbia
mmilan@svetnauke.org
www.svetnauke.org
www.facebook.com/mmilan
www.linkedin.com/in/mmilann/