The forum capabilities of the system are similar to those in most online forum systems and will be familiar to many who have participated in online communities. For those who are new to online forums, this section will be a good primer.
Forum Structure
Forums have a clear hierarchical structure based on the following model.
· Forum Collection: This is the root level for all of the forums in a site. In our case this is literally what you see when you navigate to http://communities.psych.org/forums
o Forum Groups: A forum group is a logical grouping of forums based on arbitrary criteria such as topic, audience, function or other as appropriate. In our case, we are initially grouping forums based on categories of users. (e.g. General Members, Assembly, B.o.T., etc.)
§ Forum(s): A forum is a group of conversations or threads.
· Threads: A thread is a conversation consisting of Posts or messages.
o Posts: A post is the actual message being submitted to the system or site.
So in our case the page at http://communities.psych.org/forums is the forum collection. On that page, you can see several forum groups such as “Site Support…”, “General Member Forums”, “Assembly Forums” and more. Within each forum group, you can see individual forums. For example, within the Assembly Forums group, there are currently two separate forums: “Open Floor” intended to be used as an open forum for all assembly members to use, and “ACOP” intended to be used only by members of the Assembly Committee on Planning. Inside the ACOP forum, you will find a list of the current conversation threads such as “Welcome to the ACOP Forum Pilot!” and “Another quick note about the profile...” These conversation threads will contain posts which are the actual messages submitted b users of the site.
This image shows two forum groups (General Member Forums and Assembly Forums) and the individual forums within each group:
William Bruce
Chief Information Officer
American Psychiatric Association