Discussion forums
Discussion forums come in three varieties:
- simple email groups. These 'push' email to subscribers whenever someone makes a contribution.
- web-based discussion forums. These require a user to visit a site to participate.
- hybrid web-email forums. These publish content to a web page so anyone can read it or find old postings, and also send emails to subscribers either with the new comment or to alert them of new content on the web page.
Examples of sites that have successfully combined web-based communication with email-list technology are: Groupserver 
and the communitybuilders.nsw discussion forum. When the CommunityBuilders forum moved from being email-only to being a hybrid web-email, usage of the forum jumped dramatically. CommunityBuilders sends out by email a daily digest of contributions and people click on the email link to be taken to the web forum to reply or make a new posting.
True story
Online tools give extra dimension to counselling
Kids Help Line www.kidshelp.com.au is an anonymous and confidential national counselling service for young people. The service provides kids with access to counsellors using real time ‘chat’ instant messaging.
In 2003 the service added visual tools to allow young people to ‘show’ emotions and feelings rather than having to describe them in words. Being able to communicate with counsellors visually, in addition to text, means young people have more ways to express themselves and be understood in a medium they find relevant and engaging.
The tools allow kids to design the look of the counselling screen they use to talk with their counsellor. They also include a set of coloured jewels which represent the most common emotions expressed by young people during counselling such as sad, depressed, angry and frustrated. Each has several relevant words attached to provide kids with a broader emotional vocabulary and a way of linking words to their feelings.
These too ls are the result of work on interactive online counselling tools designed by students and staff at the Centre for Creative Industries Research and Applications Centre at the Queensland University of Technology. See full case study.
Most discussion forums are moderated. That means that all contributions to the forum are vetted by one or more forum moderators before being made available to everyone else. This protects the site from ‘comment spam’ and vexatious or defamatory comment.
The software used to support online forums ideally should be able to:
- create a regular digest of posts
- moderate comments, with all comments held in the backend of the system invisible to the public until they have been approved
- close comments on sessions, after a certain time, so that postings do not continue to have to be moderated
- combat 'comment spam' (this is an increasing problem on the internet as unscrupulous people attempt to inflate their search engine ranking by posting links to their site, and/or site/s they are being paid to promote, on other sites).
The ability to combat comment spam will include:
- requiring users to register before being able to post comments
- hiding or encoding the email addresses of people posting to the forum to make it harder for spammers to collect email addresses to abuse
- blocking/ignoring comments from certain registered users or IP numbers/ranges that are continually posting spam or inappropriate comments, again to reduce comment spam and the moderation workload.