I’d like to seek opinions from fellow community managers about the differences and similarities between a community and a forum.
In the earlier days, ‘forums’ was the most common term for online discussions. Now a days, ‘forum’ is now used interchangeably with ‘community’. Is a community same as a forum?
What do you think?
Community Administrator • 1w
What a fantastic topic to discuss, Thomas! Around the early 2000s, forums were referred to as message boards. Forums offered a structured discussions with threads moderated by dedicated moderators to ensure quality.
There is a difference between community and forum. A forum is a subset of a community. Let me explain.
A community refers to a group of people united by similar interests, goals, passion or pain. A community usually refers to such group that interacts with each other, works on problems, ideas together and create value together.
The interaction could be in the form of 'discussion', 'webinar', 'chat', 'quiz', 'poll', 'comment' etc. Forums simply offer a structured format to the discussions, questions and answers.
However, a community goes beyond discussions. Modern communities need more than simple discussions to stay active.
In my last job as the Head of Growth at a SaaS, I built a video developers community. We noticed that discussions were a limiting factor in engaging people. We hosted hackathons, webinars, AMA sessions, real-time chats, quizzes and more such activities to keep our community active.
To summarise, forums are an integral part of the communities. I'd say a community is incomplete without a forum that encourages healthy discussion among the community members.
I'd love to hear from our fellow community members.
