ocPortal Tutorial: Organising discussion forums

Written by Chris Graham, ocProducts

Discussion forums are a communication medium for site users, based around topics of conversation organised into forums.

This tutorial will explain how discussion forums work, and how to best organise them.

Table of contents

ocPortal Tutorial: Organising discussion forums

Structure

Adding a forum

When editing forums, the full structure is displayed, with an opportunity to re-order both categories and sub-forums within

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Forums are actually a very powerful collaboration tool, not merely limited to chat. For example, ocProducts use a forum as an integral part of the processs for the designing of the software you're using right now: it is surprising what forums and topics can be made to represent.\n\n

Rough structure of the discussion forums

So, now that I have explained the structure of a discussion forum, I will explain what each of these constructs are for. A forum exists to organise topics into some kind of common subject. For example, it is common for a website to have a debates forum, which contains member-created topics, each representing a single debate. A topic in the debates forum such as a topic titled 'Does extraterrestrial life exist?', contains a number of member-created posts, that together form a continuing line of discussion. A topic gets created, in the most appropriate forum, when a member wishes to discuss something and knows of no topic to continue (by making a new post in); the topic is started with a single post, that leads the discussion, by the member who made the topic.
The sub-forum system exists so that forums may be organised such that subjects are logically sub-classified in such a way as to prevent an 'explosion' of forums displayed on the root forum (which would be cluttered and difficult to navigate); whether a forum with sub-forums allows topics itself is up to you, but often allowing this is a useful technique for allowing placement of a topic that classifies under a forum, but not one of the sub-forums.

Adding a forum category

Important note

Whilst discussion forums are primarily meant for discussion, they may in-fact be used for the general purpose of conveying information. It is often typical for a topic that may-not-be-replied-to be made by staff to convey some form of alert: the discussion forums might be used rather than news, or some other ocPortal medium, due to the easiness of creating and organising topics, the flexibility of the medium, or to target an audience that views the discussion forums more regularly than the other mediums.

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Topics in a forum

Within a forum, there are a number of to modify a topic, to change their behaviour:

A topic may be 'pinned' (also known as 'stickied' in some systems). A pinned topic is placed at the top of the topic list, usually as it contains importer information.
A topic may be made 'cascading'. Cascaded topics appear in all forums in the forum tree, underneath (and including) the forum they are placed in. The cascade property is often used to make forum-wide announcements.
A topic may be 'closed'. Only those with the necessary specific permission may post in a closed topic.
The validation status of a topic (or post) may be changed. Topics that are no validated are only viewable by moderators and the topic creator. Members without at least the "instant posting" access level will forcibly have their topics and posts starting as unvalidated.

Topics may be moved between forums by moderators.

Strategies for organising your forums

A root forum

A sub-forum of the root forum

When you design your discussion forums, you need to decide what forums you will create, and how to organise them. A very common mistake is to create far too many forums, which has the effect of diluting your community, and making it feel dead: which in return often terminally reduces member activity. If a month after creating a forum, you expect it to have less than ten topics, then you probably should not be making it: remember: you can always add new forums later, and mass move topics into them. Conversely, it would be a mistake to create too few forums, leading to a situation where it is difficult to locate topics, and to quickly identify the kinds of topic subject that are encouraged.

OCF creates a default forum structure which is appropriate for a small or new community. You may wish to add a new category with approximately three forums (sub-forums of the root forum) tagged for it, providing for subjects specific to your site.

Using access permissions effectively

All forums define whether members of each user-group has access to them, as well as allowing specific-permission overrides. As normal with the ocPortal permission system, members have the 'best' permissions out of those available to each of their user-groups.

It is common to deny most user-groups any kind of access to certain forums, such as staff forums, to make them private to all but select members.

It is also common to limit access to certain important forums, such as a 'News forum', so that their content can be kept clean.

Setting bypass-validation access

By default, forum permissions are set so that members need their posts validating before they show up. This can be changed using ocPortal's standard permission functionality, but as it is a common task, we thought we'd explain it as an example…

You'll need to enable the following global specific permission (in the 'Submission' set of specific permission settings):
'Bypass validator for lowrange content'
if a member is to be able to post without requiring validation.
and:
'Bypass validator for midrange content'
if a member is to be able to create a topic without requiring validation.

Or, alternatively, you can use the Permission Tree Editor to set these on the 'forumview' module (if you don't want these to apply globally).

Or, alternatively, you can set them against specific forums in either the Permission Tree Editor or the editing screen of a forum.

As you can see, the permissions may be set in a number of places. This is very intentional- you have a choice of setting things at a high level to apply to the whole website, but also the choice to make overrides at a lower level.

Polls

Topics may have a poll attached to them (by any member) by default, so as to gauge opinion tied to a discussion. These polls are separate to the main ocPortal poll system, and have different options. Forum polls may only be used by members, and there are options to restrict:

viewing of poll results until the poll is 'un-blinded'
such that that members must reply to the topic of the poll before they may vote in it

Concepts

discussion forums: A system for discussing issues; topics contain posts, and topics are organised into forums which themselves are structured
forum: A place for the archiving and posting of topics of discussion
sub-forum: A forum underneath another forum in the forum tree structure
forum category: A categorisation of a forum, distinct from the tree structure
topic: A string of sequential posts
post: A piece of writing made by a user and displayed as a continuation, or start, of a topic
pin: A pinned topic is displayed above a non-pinned topic (otherwise, date order is used for sorting)
cascade: A cascading topic is displayed in it's forum, and all subforums there-of
root forum: The forum at the root of the forum tree structure