Email is a great point to point messaging system. Email is also good for distributing information to a group of people who we think are interested in that bit of information.
This does not always work; people want to know things they are interested in. They also want to pull out the information rather then pushed. Internet forum or message board is a great way of achieving that.
People can ask question, get answers by the community or authority, message is saved for future reference. The message is also saves as a thread which gives a better understanding on the conversation. A search option makes the forum even more accessible.
There are various ways of starting a forum. You can start with hosted forum powered yahoo/google, or you can start your own one. Business organization probably would like to have their own forum to have better control and security like myBB, PhpBB, vBulletin. Internet forum is also known as bulletin boards.
Moodle has its in-build forum module. The initial purpose was to use forum for better learning delivery as a part of the course, however forum can be used independently just as a discussion group.
This can be achieved in Moodle by setting the course in social format. This format is oriented around one main forum, the social forum, which appears listed on the main page. It is useful for situations that are more free form. They may not even be courses.
To run a forum in Moodle
1. Create a course 2. Make sure social format is selected 3. Navigate back to the course 4. Click on Add a new discussion topicTo participate in the forum
5. Under the forum topic click on “Discuss this topic”
To update for forum properties
6. on the course page, with the forum description click on the edit button 7. Change the settings as desired in forum settings
Other useful tips on setting up forms:
Search block is a useful block makes sure it is displayed and easily accessible.
Social activity block will show the forum and resources attached to this course. This is useful if you have files you would like all forum members to easily access access
Resent activity block gives you an idea on what recent activity is going on this forum
Tag: Moodle, Moodle for business, social format, forum, Moodle bulletin board, setting up forum, step by step, howto, LMS, internet forum, moodle blocks, learning management system
Technology Tab 
This is informative
Thanks for the helpful Moodle tips!
I made a Social Network using Moodle and it turned out to be rocking …
BTW, since you also appear to be a Moodle fan, I think you can suggest something in this matter .. I was trying to implement an internal Course emailing system for my Moodle site but realized that the best among the plugins … i.e. EMail List is not available for version 2 +. So have you tried any other solution for internal emailing in Moodle which works well ? …
Moodle and email yes we have. All you need to do make sure Moodle can send out emails. You can trigger emails using news forum comes with every course. So all subscribed to that course will receive emails based on some settings under subscription mode, you can find under course settings.
” There are 4 subscription mode options:
Optional subscription – Participants can choose whether to be subscribed
Forced subscription – Everyone is subscribed and cannot unsubscribe
Auto subscription – Everyone is subscribed initially but can choose to unsubscribe at any time
Subscription disabled – Subscriptions are not allowed ”
Hope that answers your question
Thanks, this is interesting … will try it out