Workers at home or in the office can be inundated with beeps, bings and buzzes as multiple communication engines alert them to updates from coworkers or clients. Yet, collaborating through short responses isn’t always the way employees connect or learn.

Forum use, even as far back as Usenets and 1970s early computing, created opportunities for extended conversation among users. These larger dialogs became something to reference and learn from. What’s more, forums allow people to expand their knowledge or to deep dive into concepts collectively.

As remote work and diverse talent needs force asynchronous work, quality collaboration is essential. Modern forum spaces are also valuable to brands as they support e-commerce with community building among their customers.

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For high functioning work teams, like developer groups, forums become more useful than chats in a few ways. First, chats are designed for synchronous communication and as a result, don’t have great search or history functionality to go back to a useful conversation from six months ago. Forums, however, are structured to become an evergreen space of knowledge sharing for teams to reference great answers or explanations from past conversations at any time. Businesses that use forums thus create a living knowledge hub that grows with the team.

A second problem teams may face in public chat forums or chats is toxicity and moderation. Popular forum channels debate ideas but often without true moderation. This can be mitigated with more robust forum platforms like Discourse that use AI to help moderate the community and keep conversation within a set of civil standards that encourage growth and learning. As important, businesses that use the forum own all their data and can access forum history at any time, a significant difference from other enterprise chat systems.

Customers and employees are finding that forum conversations and communities are becoming a broader part of our culture. From shopper reviews and conversations on product use, lifestyle and brand community building, to internal workflows, contemporary businesses are shifting beyond synchronous chat to a deeper digital engagement with teams.