Forums ~ Standard Terminology

This page outlines a set of standardized terminology to be used when describing the forum across user stories, the ERD, and any other documentation. Please refer to and align your terminology with this page whenever writing or reviewing any such documentation. Furthermore, every effort should be made to align the forum's codebase with these standards wherever possible.

NOTE: If it is found necessary to add to or revise this information in the future, by all means open an issue and do so. However, be aware that it may then become necessary to update any existing documentation to align with the newly revised standards.

The Forum

• The chigame forum as a whole.

Category

• A collection of forums, i.e. the Games or General category.

Forum

• A collection of topics, i.e. the Game X forum in the Games category or the Technical Help forum in the General category.
• Has previously been referred to as a Community or a Subforum.

Topic

• A collection of posts/comments representing a conversation, i.e. a user creates a topic to discuss the latest update to Game X in the Game X forum.
• Has previously been referred to as a Discussion or a Thread.

Post

• An individual message within a topic, i.e. another user replies to the original post in a topic with a post of their own.

Comment/Reply

• Same as post, but exclusive of the original post at the beginning of a topic.

Forum Admin

• An admin of the forum only (may also be chigame admin), this user has all of the permissions of a forum moderator, as well as the ability to add and delete categories and forums. Preferably a staff member, although not necessarily a developer.

Forum Moderator

• A community member tasked with policing the forums. This user has permissions to do things like lock, delete, and pin posts; and ban or suspend users from the forum.

Some additional terms that may come up when discussing the forum but reside primarily outside of the scope of the forum itself:

Chigame Admin

• An admin of the chigame platform broadly, the highest permission level. Should be a staff member / developer.

Registered User

• An authenticated user of the chigame platform broadly. Authentication and general account settings are managed outside of the forum but users may additionally have forum specific roles, permissions, statistics, and public profiles.

Unregistered User

• An unauthenticated user of the chigame platform broadly. Only has access to view public areas of the forum and cannot create topics or posts.

Group

• A group of users on the chigame platform broadly, these are managed outside of the forum but may have access to their own forums and other forum functionality.

Group Admin

• A group owner, able to add or remove users from the group, modify group settings, schedule group events, etc.