Forum Content Hierarchy  

Forums typically have a single overall purpose. Forums might focus on support or human resources or they might provide customers with a place to trade product tips and solutions.

Forums are built in a hierarchy to improve ease-of-use and provide easy access to relevant information. From the largest component to smallest, the hierarchy looks like this:

 

Category

A category bundles related forums. You can create a structure of categories starting from the root category. Each category can contain both subcategories and forums.

Forum

A forum generally focuses on a single thread or a small group of associated threads. If you define a forum too broadly, message threads within the forum can quickly lose focus and become unwieldy and confusing.

Thread

A thread is an individual question or subject discussed within the scope of a single forum. A thread is defined as an original message and all of its replies. Threads may be only a few messages long or include hundreds of messages.

By their nature, threads tend to 'drift'. Moderators may need to intervene to keep a thread focused on the subject for which it was created. They can do this by creating new threads when necessary and by moving content (messages and entire threads) from one location to another.

Message

A message refers to a single question, discussion point, or reply that is posted to a forum. Messages comprise a subject header, a message body, and sometimes file attachments.