A forum is similar to a supported module. In other words, a public message center. Through forums the users can post messages ,either to a group at large or to certain users. However, all postings can be seen by anyone else who has access to that forum, so refrain from sharing secret informations among each other. Forums are also threaded, which means a reply to a particular posting becomes part of the "thread" of that posting that can be followed to provide a cohesive progression through a particular topic. You can get the references of your previous postings as well.

Some advantages of forums:

1) Forums facilitates exchange of ideas and informations. There are forums based on topics on which one can login in order to share/get informations from others. Its acts like a big virtual information centre.

2) Forums are the platform where the like minded people meet. you can have a forum based on your subject matter as well. One can cultivate their hobby through forums. Informations on wide range of topics are discussed through the forum.

3) It plays an important role in attracting traffic. Visitors will visit your website in order to see the update of the forums. It is also found that people come back to the site in order to view a discussion on some interesting topic as well. Forums makes the visitors to come back to your website again and again.

4) Forums can be faster, cheapest and the most effective way of promotion. the forum administrator can send messages to all those who are using the forum. If you are selling something new through your website, then you can intimate all the forum members immediately.

5) Forum helps in business creation as well. The website owner can advertise about his latest products and services to all the forum members. As the membership of the forum grows the strength of the advertising impact goes increasing.

6) A direct source of revenue is the selling of banner ads. The revenue produced by this is directly related to the number of members on the forum.

These are the advantages of using forums. There are forums which links back to the website and hence helps in generating fresh content to the website thereby enhancing the website ranking on the search engine.