Whats the difference between a chat room and a message board?
A chat room is a place where you go and engage other people in real-time. Text scrolls upwards on your screen as individuals “talk” to one another. If you find something that someone writes to be compelling, you’ll type in a response and it will appear on the screen for everyone in the room to see. Once you leave a chat room, there is generally no historical record kept of the conversation. Also, the topics in a chat room are wide-ranging and generally not as well organized as message boards. Chat rooms are most conducive to lighter, more socially focused conversations. On message boards each message written on a message board has its own page and shows up alone. People then read that message and have time to think about and respond to it. Message boards are permanent records of the information that can be referred to every day, even weeks or years after it was written. Message boards act more as research and publishing tools than as chat rooms.
