This article outlines the general features commonly found in various Internet forum software packages.
Themes may simply be a different set of colors and graphics, or they may involve a different layout to the forum, such as one optimized for small-screen devices.
[109] Whether the internationalization and localization of the software are sufficient to both allow and actually provide grammatically correct support for the native language of the target users.
[110] For the purposes of this table, we consider languages used by a number of installations/users equal to at least 1% of the top million web properties using that software,[111] without major reported bugs in support.
[114] Many users do not bother to search a forum and directly create new threads to seek an answer to a question.
A forum cannot succeed unless there is an effective system of defense, and an efficient set of tools for spam removal.
A user-unfriendly URL may contain cryptic parameters, numeric IDs, or file type extensions (e.g. .php) that do not matter to the user and could change if the forum is reimplemented using a different programming language.
[115] This issue can be resolved by rewriting external links to point to a redirection page that performs referer hiding.