DISCUSSIONS
- A blog is like an interactive magazine with sections and the ability for people to react to the articles and have others see those reactions. You can't alter others' posts.
- A forum is like a public bulletin board where you can post ideas and your reactions to others thoughts. These are organized into categories. Like blogs, you can't alter others' posts.
- A wiki is a collaborative resource book - a shared knowledge-base space, you can alter what others' post to keep the space more organized and useful for readers later.
Which one to use depends on the technical level of your users, if you are interested in centrally generated vs community-generated content and what you want it to look/work like after it has 100s of entries.
Blogs
Someone posts their thoughts or articles and then people react to that "article" with comments that others can read.
- easy for everyone to use and understand - so good if your users are less technical
- geared for centrally-generated content, but wanting input
- like an interactive magazine - they can have images and links on them and they will look like most web pages
- need someone assigned to update and monitor
Forums
The people using a forum create categories and articles and can react to each others' ideas.
- good if your users can be trained a little or are already familiar with forum software
- for community-generated content
- sometimes they are slow to get started - people have to see value, something to react to before they join in
- someone monitors the forum, but doesn't edit very much
- after lots of entries it can be a little difficult to find things
- people on the forum can't alter each others' posts, they can just react to them
Of the three options here, forums are targeted the most by trolls and spammers so require the most monitoring
(and ongoing work by your host). (trolls are people that repeatedly violate the etiquette of your site and post ads,
illicit messages, etc)
Forum examples: City of Mankato Your Take, http://s7.invisionfree.com/The_Guillotine_Forum/
Wikis
You've heard of wikipedia - the user-maintained encyclopedia online - you can create your own web site wiki.
- very easy to read and use
- all users can alter the pages together - so you don't get the "threads" idea that you have with a forum
- software keeps past versions of pages for you to refer to anytime
- wikis are for both centrally generated and community-generated content
- categories, articles and reactions are all editable by everyone
- someone has to sort of set up a structure and get the ball rolling
- after they are up and running, they don't require much monitoring (if they are in a password protected area), but should be reviewed and cleaned up every 6 months to a year.
- wikis are free form - you can put diagrams and links on them and you effectively are creating web pages
Wiki Examples: http://carrepair.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page, http://en.wikipedia.org
Note: If you are primarily trying to announce things to a group of people we recommend either using an email list or posting the information on a web page - with or without a password.