In the broadest terms, a forum is a place where people can have discussions. Forums can be a great resource for information, as well as highly entertaining and engaging. I joined my first online forum in 2002 to learn more about a car I had just purchased. I discovered very quickly that this forum was much more than a great place to learn about the car, it was a place where a community had formed and where I could have a lot of fun too. It helped me get more from my car, and it helped me interact with a lot of like-minded people. Most of my forum time over the years has been spent helping students with mathematics. Education is important, math education is particularly important, and helping others gain a better understanding of mathematics is a great way for me to give back to the world to try to make it a better place. I've also spent a great deal of time developing an extensive line of free forum add-ons to help others give their forums more features. So, forums have provided an excellent channel for my efforts to volunteer to help. Forums face a great deal of competition now from social media, and suffer from being considered difficult to use by today's uninitiated and relatively lazy users who find even the process of registration to be difficult. In the early days, most people using forums, were tech savvy, had been using computers for years, and had little difficulty navigating the software. Now, with so many mobile only users who have no experience with or interest in computers, have little interest in making much effort to learn how about user interfaces, and aren't interested much in community, forums are suffering a decline in popularity. Forum admins increasingly face issues of making things as simple and basic as possible to cater to the new generation of internet users. However, with simplicity, often comes lack of actual utility. Forum owners also face issues with mobile browsers not being up to the task of correctly rendering CSS and running javascript, and they wrongly take the blame as users complain that the site is "broken" when in fact, it is the user's device and/or software that is just not up to the task.
A place to discuss with people. Discuss the written way. A very good forum: A place to discuss and share intelligence with other people.
I like forums because I can say weird crap that I wouldn’t say irl, and get things off my chest. Kind of gives you freedom of speech that you don’t always have in irl settings.
A place where I can talk about food without sounding like food, which is fooding foodny because we're food to other food.
