Forums

Add forums anywhere within your wiki to encourage even more discussions...

Overview

Many users feel uncomfortable contributing to a wiki - they are unsure as to whether they are allowed to and often feel worried that they'll get in to trouble.

Forums are an idea way to break down barriers to contribution and encourage users to start adding and discussing content in a much more informal manner. Almost everyone knows what a forum is and what it's used for - put one in your wiki and people instantly start collaborating.

Adding a forum to any part of your wiki is trivial - just add the forum macro to a wiki page and you get a new forum. The macro allows you to select from several different visualisations and options to customise your forum. There's also a handy add-topic macro that makes it easy to add custom links that add new topics to a forum.

Tip: You can use the forum macro as a custom recently updated content list for any part of a wiki space. Learn more...

All the usual Confluence features

Topics are just wiki pages, so you can do all the usual stuff:

Macros

{forum} macro Adds a forum to the current page. Learn more...

{add-topic} macro Creates a customisable "Add Topic" link. Learn more...

The alternatives

A forum macro isn't going to compete with a fully fledged forum system, but we think it's a very useful solution. It's easy to use and gives you all the existing benefits of the wiki without the hassle of setting up and maintaining a separate forum application/

If you're planning to go down the third-party forum route, consider the total cost of ownership:

Having forums in the wiki keeps people in one place, makes things super-easy to manage and makes linking to and from other content trivial.