Why do so many people on Chess.com use the word "forum" to mean "thread"?  I've never seen this on other sites.  :)

Does it matter?

Perhaps because the approved term for thread in this discussion area is topic - which some people think makes them sound a little nutty.

As the Bard (almost) said: "What's in a nomenclature?"

I think a consensus is a ruling factor here.

Forum is being used as an abbreviation for forum post? The terminology is alien to many posters?

Seeing as forum thread is a term in and of itself. We shall take a look at the definitions of such terms.

Forum: "3. an assembly, meeting place, television program, etc., for the discussion of questions of public interest."

Thread: "10. Computers. a series of newsgroup messages dealing with the same subject."

Many people on this site are not too fluent in English. So, it is rightly so that they will skew the placement of words and phrases in sentences. Also, they are most likely going to misuse words and phrases. A "common" error, I suppose?

@an_arbitrary_name -- Though, I don't see the importance of all this... If you want to correct a member's grammar, then you should join other members, as well as me, in this "thread" (as it has no "topic").

Chess.com uses the terms forums and topics. Each of the categories: Chess.com Community, Daily Puzzles, Live Chess, etc. is a separate forum.

Online discussions and email messages are generally organised differently. With email messages, all of the messages sit in a single bucket. Your viewer usually allows you to group messages by subject or by sender, or to show them in date order. Additionally, you may have the facility to see the links between messages: i.e. the replies to a message, the replies to the replies, and so on. A thread can mean a set of messages with the same Subject – or a subset of those dealing with a particular aspect.

Here, you only have the view of posts for a single topic at a time. You can have different strands of conversation within a single topic, but there is no facility to view the strands separately.

Now we know what the topic is – except in kurogkug’s case – and we have an excellent forum (i.e. the forums), let’s get on with it!