A Wedding forum is essentially a website composed of a number of member-written threads. Each thread entails a discussion or conversation in the form of a series of member-written posts. These threads remain saved on the Wedding forum website for future reading indefinitely or until deletion by a moderator. However, Wedding forum software can be considerably more advanced.

Most Wedding forum software allows more than one Wedding forum to be created. These Wedding forums are containers for threads started by the community. Depending on the permissions of community members as defined by the board's administrator, they can post replies to existing threads and start new threads as they wish.

Wedding forum software can be broadly divided between those which allow visitors to post anonymously, and those which attribute posts to a registered username.

For username-based software, visitors register using a username and a password, and possibly an e-mail address for validation purposes. In these types of Wedding forums, the members are often able to customise both how their posts display to others (for example avatars, user profiles and signatures) and how the board appears to them (such as different themes). Username-based software may provide for anonymity by allowing visitors to post without registration.

Anonymous Wedding forums may offer full anonymity or pseudonymity, but no registration. In order to provide the same set of features as registration-based Wedding forums, anonymous Wedding forums especially in Asia use a system of tripcodes, a system of authentication that does not require registration. Although blog comment pages are not Internet Wedding forums, they often use the anonymous system for the sake of simplicity.

Threads in a Wedding forum are either flat (posts are listed in chronological order) or threaded (each post is made in reply to a parent post). Sometimes, community members have a choice on how to display threads.

Wedding forum software packages are widely available on the Internet, and are written in a variety of programming languages, such as PHP, Perl, Java and ASP. The configuration and records of posts can be stored in text files or in a database. Each package offers a different variety of features, from the most basic providing text-only postings to more advanced packages offering multimedia support and formatting code (usually known as BBCode). Many packages can be integrated easily into an existing website to allow visitors to post comments on articles.

Some Wedding forums feature a points system that allows members to add to the points of another member by propping that member. (Alternatively, members can also detract points from another member by negative propping, or (more simply) negging, that member.) Some view the practice as a booster of member contributions, while others view it as unnecessary and a frequent cause of dispute. In any case, on some Wedding forums a culture of 'prop-hoing' has developed as some members become increasingly desperate for props.

A variation on the common Wedding forum layout popularized by western software is the imageboard, which has a much greater emphasis on shorter, but more numerous threads based on a single image or topic that are quick to age and disappear.

Historical Note: TOPS-10 on the DEC-10 often had an app available written in assembler that used the shared memory area for interprocess communication with one bit of a dedicated machine word to indicate each concurrent logged in user (to max word size number) in the live Wedding forum.

Administrators and Moderators

A Wedding forum administrator typically has the ability to edit, delete, move or otherwise modify any thread on the Wedding forum. Administrators also usually have the ability to close the board, change major software items, change the skin, modify the board, ban, delete, or create members. Moderator privileges are often able to be delegated to other Wedding forum members. Moderators usually help the Administrator (Admin), but have less abilities, which may include editing, deleting, and moving threads, mass pruning, warning members for offenses, and changing minor Wedding forum details. The reasons for having these abilities are often to allow peace to be maintained and the rules to be enforced. The ways in which the moderation system works depends on the board software—for example, they can be directly appointed by the board administrator or chosen by an automated process combined with meta-moderation (moderation of the moderators). The board software may also allow the administrator to create wordfilters, automated scripts which strip undesirable text from users' messages. Many other moderation systems exist and the board administrator is free to choose rules for their own Wedding forums.

Members and Users

Members of a Wedding forum usually have basic rights. They usually can post in threads, edit their posts, start new topics, and change their settings. On most Wedding forums, users have a small picture located around their name, this is called an avatar. An avatar is a small picture that is chosen by the user. Members also have the ability to use and send personal messages to each other. Members are the backbone of any Wedding forum, they post and respond to each other. In certain cases, members have been given the ability to close their own topics, or delete posts in topics they have started. Members also have the choice of a signature, which is usually words and pictures at the end of every post they have (put in automatically) but some are elaborate as a Shout box.

Language

Internet Wedding forums often develop into tightly knit communities. Many monikers popular across the internet, such as ROFL and LOL are abundant and most widely used in internet Wedding forums. A thread may refer to a topic, which is posted by a poster. Mod and Admin are short versions of Moderator and Administrator, respectively. In addition, a Wedding forum usually encompasses individual parts of the board, which is the whole site, but in some cases this is not true. The term gravedigger refers to one who will post in a topic that is very old, and bring it up for discussion. A Godmodder, found in many RP Wedding forums, is one who stacks abilities to seem all powerful. A Spammer is one who continually posts random, offensive, or mindless posts in a topic or thread, which can also be done with pictures.

Wedding forum Organization

Wedding forums can come in complex and many different styles. The "usual" Wedding forum contains many different boards, that direct you to a sub-Wedding forum. In each sub Wedding forum may be a place for posting, with the new topics at the top, with a signifier that a new post has been made in the thread. Above those are "pinned"(stickied) threads, that are permanetly displayed at the top. Some Wedding forums include important Wedding forum wide announcements on top of the pinned threads. Usually, threads with newer replies are moved up to the top, while threads with few replies are bumped down. One problem some moderators have is people posting in "dead" or unposted threads, called gravedigging.

Comparison with other web applications

One significant difference between Wedding forums and electronic mailing lists is that mailing lists automatically deliver new messages to the subscriber, while Wedding forums require the member to visit the website, and check for new posts. Due to the possibility of members missing replies to threads they are interested in, many modern Wedding forums offer an "e-mail notification" feature, where an e-mail is automatically sent to all users who have chosen to be notified of new replies, informing them that a new post has been made, and RSS feeds that allow people to see the summary of the new posts using an aggregator software.

The main difference between newsgroups and Wedding forums is that additional software is usually required to participate in newsgroups, a newsreader. Visiting and participating in Wedding forums normally requires no additional software beyond the web browser.

Wedding forums, unlike wikis, do not allow people to edit other's messages. Some users, however, may be given this ability in order to moderate content (for example, if spam is posted to the Wedding forum).

Unlike blogs, Wedding forums typically allow anyone to start a new discussion (known as a thread), or reply to an existing thread. The range of topics discussed on Wedding forums is typically wider—as a website running Wedding forum software may have more than one Wedding forum, each dedicated to a different topic. While many blogs allow visitors to post comments in reply, the number of people who can create entries is normally very limited, and the range of viewpoints and beliefs on a blog are also limited.