Advantages:
•Ability to express and see differing views and opinions on a diverse range of topics.
•Forums create a discussion environment by saving any information posted on a certain topic for others to see at any time, thus people can have high-quality discussions since they would have time to think about and research the topic/comment at hand.
•There is a freedom of speech, and people can write in any form they want (chatting style, diary style, etc.)
•Due to continuous posting, users (e.g. students) increase their writing skills and habits, making them more responsive and knowledgeable of others’ ideas.
•Online communities can be made, no matter how low the traffic volumes may be, since people would often return to the site to see what has happened to certain topics of interest.
•Allows an increase in the traffic of repeated visitors: if many people are interested in the posts and comments, they will continuously come back to the site, making it more popular and active.
•If the forum is successful and attractive, then registered members will not treat your e-mails and messages as spam, but rather as opportunities, even if the site-master was offering products for sale.
•Relationships can easily be made between people through active comments and posts.
•In a forum, people of different ages, points of view, backgrounds, and experience can share information on a certain topic which would conclusively offer a broad response to the topic at hand.
•Forums offer thoughts as well as feelings, so they can easily relate with people surfing the Web.
•Students can easily access what their classmates and professors posted, so they can comment and create an active online classroom society.
Disadvantages:
•Opens you up to hackers, spammers and predators.
•Creating a successful forum is exhausting because the forum-master must present all the topics for discussion on a continuous basis for months, and the topics have to be interesting so that people start commenting. This means that the forum-master must also make sure that what is being posted is not spam and non-sense (all time-consuming aspects). Otherwise, all of the work and hard efforts will go to waste.
•Administrators can edit people’s posts, and they can ban/mute people if they put some ideas with which they don’t feel comfortable with, even if the ideas may be useful and true to others.
•People may give up posting due to the responses lacking body language, taking much longer to propose than verbal conversations, and being misleading and useless.
•Forums may fail suddenly if one certain contributor stops contributing, making the forum ‘dead’ to new responses and posts.
•Posts may not be credible, and instead of helping clear up questions, they can bring up more questions.
•Posts may become sloppy, messy, and off topic.
•Any random person may come onto the forum and spam the threads, making the forum less attractive, thus losing many members and visitors.
