Splat | WiseTome.com

For various reasons, one may need to have a place to discuss on a particular topic with others. A blog is a good way to do it, but it is mostly one person who contributes it, and the most others can do is to comment on it. Yes, there can be multiple authors for a single blog, but it would seem like there is something to be asked for when there are more than a handful of members.

To acomplish this, one can use forums. Forums had made its way to the internet way before blogs and other content mangement systems came in vogue. Forumns still maintain their usablility. Forums, or alternatively called as message-boards, allows a huge number of members to exchange ideas. Most notable advantage of forum, is that people from different time-zones can indulge in discussions.

There are many different forum softwares that mostly run on PHP and MySQL. Invision Power Board, vBulletin, phpBB are some of the popular ones. It must be noted that, the servers where these forums are hosted need to have the support for PHP, MySQL or anyother technology the forum-software demands for. There are some host providers, who cater to forum-hosting alone.

Big Boards - If you want to look at some of the forums that are already online, you should visit Big Boards. I do not want to dump any specific forum, hence I am redirecting you to the Big Boards site.
InvisionFree - If you find a topic and community that requires a forum, you can get one for yourself for free. InvisionFree is just one of the free forum-hosting service provider. I have used them for my forum RPG, Chaos And Order, and found them quite competant. You can, however, Google search for other providers.
The Admin Zone - Now, if you host a forum, and you are the administrator of the forum, you would have a lot of questions pertaining to running a forum. My advice is to join this forum, that is for all the forum-administrators out there.