ChipChat® Forum, Discussion & Bulletin Boards
The ChipChat Forum (aka Bulletin Board) is a platform for communication and community building. Forums, Discussion boards and Bulletin Boards are all essentially the same thing: online spaces for communication and discussion. This web-based application provides an online space where users can create a post, read messages from other users, share and exchange information and ideas and participate in discussions about specific topics.
The ChipChat Forum provides easy to use tools to administer the forms to provide:
Discussions: ChipChat Forum users can engage in conversations, ask questions, and share opinions. The administrator option allows for holding and reviewing of conversations to be sure they are appropriate.
Information Sharing: The ChipChat Forums can be used to disseminate information, announcements or updates. The ChipChat forum integrates with the ChipChat Blog and can be configured to provide automatic forum announcements when new associated Blog entries are posted.
Community Building: The ChipChat Forums can foster a sense of community , amoung users who share common interests.
Early days of personal computers, before the widespread use of the World Wide Web, saw the rise in Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) as the primary method for people to connect and share information. These systems allowed users to “dial in” to a central computer via a modem and access text-based menus and messages. These were also sometimes called “Message Boards”
A Bulletin Board could host a number of different discussion groups, or forums, and the terms “bulletin Board”, “message board” and “forum” where often used interchangeable. Popular BBS systems included CBBS, ExecPC BBS, FidoNet, and CompuServe
However, today, the term “computer bulletin board” and BBS are largely considered relics of the past, and the concept of online bulletin boards has evolved into what we know today as discussion groups or more commonly called “Forums”.
