Known variously as chat pages, discussion forums, bulletin boards or message areas, these exciting website components are about providing an area which people can use to communicate with each other, share ideas, and build up a small online community. Here are a number of reasons why you might want to do this.

If you offer training courses, you're no doubt familiar with the problem of retention of knowledge and skills which may follow a day or week of intensive learning. Providing a forum online for course attendees can be an excellent way of consolidating people's knowledge, thus adding value to the course they've taken, and enhancing the value of your product in the process. Such a forum could be password protected, so that only attendees can visit there, and could contain one or more seed messages such as "how are each of you putting your new working practices into effect within your own working environments, and what difficulties have you encountered". The course speaker could also take part, to follow up on any issues that the course has raised.

If you sell a software product, a discussion forum can be a highly beneficial way of providing relatively low-cost tech support. It's something which needs to be properly planned, because it will require constant supervision from one or more members of your tech support staff, but if they answer questions through that forum rather than in one-on-one support calls, many others can benefit from the same answer. You may even find other users chipping in and answering support questions for each other! Some may be concerned about the risks involved in handling support in a more public forum, (although the area is usually restricted access to users only), but having such a forum does demonstrate a high level commitment to top-line technical support - something which may influence future purchasing decisions in favour of that company.

At Room101, we've been providing online chat pages since March 1996, and have built up a considerable experience in both programming different environments and attending to the management and supervision issues involved. As is the case with anywhere open to the general public, there is always the potential for trouble to be caused by mischief makers. An obvious remedy is to make your forum password protected, but you might be specifically looking for new users to come along and express their viewpoints.

Example: Our standard chat environment offers features which the website administrator can use to remove unwelcome messages. This is done using a simple web page where you just click on the message you want to remove. For those requiring additional security, we have also devised a message board format where new messages do not show up immediately, but are stored in a queue awaiting approval. It's then up to the website owner to inspect these messages and approve each for display by clicking on them.