terminology:
I use ‘Forums’ here in the modern specific sense to mean a particular type of online public discussion space where the entries are displayed together on one page rather than in separate windows. The vulgarised Latin plural doesn’t
bother me. ‘Threaded Discussions’ means presenting each post as an individual item, read sequentially through time rather than space e.g. email discussion lists, usenet newsgroups, FirstClass community ware.

Some experience is starting to suggest that when forums are used as opposed to threaded discussions, you get better quality conversations . Indeed, Stephen Powell seems to be sure of it. “The fragmented nature of FC conversations is in stark contrast to the rich flow of ideas possible where contributions are displayed sequentially on the same page…. ….The advantages are the ability to quickly scan up and down as one might when trying to understand a complex section in a book. This helps not just with reading and understanding, but also with the composing of contributions and replies. Indeed, this seems to be such an obvious difference that I wonder why anyone would through choice build software that didn’t have this facility!”

I’m going to try and answer that while my own preference is still somewhat undecided.

In response to Nancy White’s 1st question in the current ultraversity hotseat : “The use of Online community and interaction for discussion and debate – in other words, for learning! How do we do this well online?”
I wrote:
“I think discussion and debate work best in an online many-to-many asynchronous community space when respondents take the trouble to quote previous messages, interspersing their comments point for point amongst the separate strands of thought. In this way, a focussed conversation can be continued, thrashing out ideas though exposure to multiple peers as a continuing critical dialogue.”

Now that is a method which can, but often isn’t, used in email and newsgroup discussions – Firstclass included, but doesn’t apply in forums. I’ve seen lots of extremely good and bad examples of this method being employed over the years. In threaded discussions, you can choose which contribution you wish to reply to, and your reply will appear appended to it. This is done properly through a “references” header containing the message-ID of the message which is being replied to so that the software can automatically organise threads for you.

Typically people will choose to read threaded discussions in a number of ways.
1) They may “catch up” with a busy threaded discussion group by using a single key “display next unread message” function to read through all the new messages, thread by thread, composing replies as they go along. In practice, this can construct a convincing illusion of synchronicity – “I read something you appear to have just said, and I respond straight away”.
2) They may sort the group into date order and read through the latest messages in date order rather than by thread. This suits the “hungry” reader, anxious to keep in touch with the latest developments.
3) They may look back at the tree structure of a thread and dip in to individual messages at appropriate points, retracing the history of the discourse in order to establish who said what in response to whom, tracing the flow of ideas.
4) etc….

In a forum, on the other hand, the user normally has little or no flexibility over how the discourse can be presented.

Threaded discussions can, if necessary, cope well with long and deep exchanges of information ideas and opinion stretching into many hundreds of posts and over weeks or months of time. Whereas Forums bump into a ceiling quite early on.

The apparent success of the format employed for the hotseat ( a customised kind of form-driven forum ) could be attributed to a number of things ( The sense of occasion, Nancy’s specific skills in engagement, ennui in FC, use of photos? ) but the format itself must be a contributory factor, I would agree.

Advantages
of forums

* the ability to see a number of contributions while composing a reply.

* hardly any “Me too” or “thankyou” posts – more signal less noise.

* easy to read in retrospect, for people coming along later

Disadvantages of forums

* awkward for the people engaged in the discussion at at the time.

* no flexibility to suit readers preferences

* scrolling is a pain

* looking for new responses to older questions is a pain, so difficult to catch up

* no off-line reader ( for people who can’t be connected all the time for whatever reason, e.g. travel, other family members )

* later responses have to be posted further down, away from what they refer to.

* the format discourages extended conversations

What would I like to see?

Nested discussion forums are an improvement over flat ones, these allow you to attach your reply to any of the previous ones and then display it indented underneath instead of at the end of the thread. Because of screen space limitations, these normally only nest and indent up to 5 levels. These are particularly easy to follow for visitors reading back through an exiting discussion and not too bad for people in the throw of it.

The forum should also have an option to enable the reader to quickly view only the latest few posts in reverse date order.

And an option to subscribe via RSS and/or email

to complete the bridge, subscribers should be able to reply right there and then from their own preferred news / mail / RSS reader

Interim conclusions

tools do affect conversation

Forums occupy a sort of middle ground. They are better than bad threaded discussions, but not as good as good ones.

Horses for courses.

The discussion has only just begun.