Forums Content Management System on the Internet: An Analytical, Comparitive Study

Document Type : Original Article

Author

قسم المکتبات والوثائق والمعلومات بکلية الآداب جامعة أسيوط

Abstract

This paper studiesforums content management systems on the Internet. It discusses its definition, features, advantages, disadvantages, and its utilizations. The paper also pinpoints a number of elements for the evaluation of these forum systems and tries torepresent criteria that enable users to choose the best forum system. 25 systems werestudied, compared and analyzed, according to the checklist prepared based on evaluation elements. The checklist includes seven main criteria, and 41 elements. The criteria are,system requirements, general features, data storage, security settings, community & data management, usability, and finally outputs/extras. The results indicate that the best forum systems are; FUDforum at 98%, followed by Vanilla, MyBB, and vBulletin at 80%.The study recommends conducting further research on discussion boards in various fields in general, the utilizing forumsin the field of libraries and information science and extending its use in that field. Further research should be conducted on its efficiency in the presence of Twitter & Facebook.

Keywords