About discussion groups

Create a discussion group to set up a forum for site visitors to communicate with each other. A discussion group is an interactive web site that lets site visitors discuss topics by reading articles that have been posted, replying to them, and posting new articles. Visitors can also use a search form to find articles of interest.

Important   A discussion group is different from the Microsoft Office Web Discussions feature. That feature enables anyone to attach comments to a web page or any document that can be opened with a browser so that the comments appear with the document but are stored on a discussion server (discussion server: A computer that stores discussion text and information about the location of the file being discussed.).

 Features of a discussion group

• A table of contents that contains hyperlinks to articles in the discussion topics
• A search form that allows visitors to search the articles for a word or phrase
• An entry form in which a visitor types an article to post
• Threaded (threaded discussion: In an online forum, such as a newsgroup, a series of messages or articles in which replies to a message are nested directly under it instead of arranged in chronological or alphabetical order.) replies, allowing visitors to choose whether the article they are posting is a new top-level topic for discussion or a reply to another article
• A confirmation page (confirmation page: A page that is displayed in a Web browser, confirming that data entered into a form has been successfully submitted. ), which confirms that a visitor's article has been posted
• A registration form that lets site visitors log in to the web site, if the discussion web is protected

  Note   Only the UNIX  (UNIX: A multi-user, multitasking operating system that exists in various forms and implementations, typically used on proprietary computer workstations. Many Web servers run on UNIX systems.)operating system allows registration through a Web browser.

Creating a discussion group

The easiest way to create a discussion group is by using the Discussion Web Wizard. The wizard asks for the features you want to use, then creates a web site and sets up the pages for you. After the web site is created, you can open the pages and customize them.

You can set the following properties for a discussion web site:

• The title of the discussion group
• The discussion web directory in which to save articles
• The format for the table of contents
• Whether to use the color and background scheme from another page in your web site
• The pages to use as headers and footers in articles
• Whether to include additional information in articles, such as the time and date

You can also manage the articles that are posted in a discussion group. For example, you can modify an article that contains offensive language.

Using a discussion group on a protected web site

If your discussion web site is protected, you can register site visitors. The wizard creates a registration form for you. You will need to open this page, customize the form as needed, save it to the root web (root web: The default, top-level web provided by a Web server. To access the root web, you supply the URL of the server without specifying a page name or subweb. ) where the discussion group is located, and then make the page available to visitors.

Note   Only the UNIX operating system allows registration through a Web browser.

Using a search form in a discussion group

You can create a search form to let a site visitor search a specific discussion web site for words or phrases. If your server finds the search text in the text index for the specified discussion web site, the visitor sees a weighted list of hyperlinks to the pages containing the search text.

If your server is using Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) (IIS: Internet Information Services. Microsoft Web server software that uses Hypertext Transfer Protocol to deliver World Wide Web documents. IIS incorporates various functions for security, allows for CGI programs, and also provides for FTP servers.), the search form uses the Indexing Service to search the text index. Indexing Service has more extensive support for searching non-English systems and Microsoft Office documents.

If your server is not using IIS, Microsoft FrontPage uses the WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) (Wide Area Information Server (WAIS): A UNIX-based document search and retrieval system on the Internet that can be used to search over 400 WAIS libraries for indexed files that match a series of keywords.) search engine that is included with FrontPage to search the text index.