A Forum, Discussion board, or even a message board are the same thing even if people use different names for them. They are basically a place where people with a common interest gather to discuss whatever is on their mind or get help with an issue. Typically it is not in real time, but it can be if people keep posting back to back.

Since I have had my own websites, I have always had a forum included with my website, so I have experience when it comes to being a administrator and on top of that also a moderator.

Before I go any farther, let me explain the difference between the two.

A administrator is the person whom has the full control of the board both on the front end and also on the back end. Most message boards have both were the backend is where the administrator can control things like the members, ranks, themes and so on. Depending on what board you use, this may not all be there.

There are two different types of moderators. There is the global moderator whom moderates the board in all areas on the front and then there is just the moderator whom usually moderates a certain board or boards like they may moderate only the technology section.

Obviously it is not an easy thing to run a community no matter how big or small they may be. Smaller is good, but as the community starts growing, then it grows. You can still have problems on your boards regardless of being small or large.

You need moderators on the board to moderate the board, to move and delete post, and to deal with members whom are causing problems.

All administrators and moderators have the same buttons when it comes to moderating unless the administrator sets to the permission settings for the moderator differently based off of what the administrator wants.

I had to put a section in about this as this is the biggest issue that I have come across. You may be asking what spam bots are. Most of you have probably seen them at least once but never realized what they were or what you saw had a name for it. These are also the reason why most boards and sites today that you sign up for have either captcha and recaptcha. Spam bots are where they post all over the forums the same thing over and over again in multiple threads. They can be anything from nonsense advertisements to something that is of pornographic in nature.

This is something that both administrators and moderators have to keep an eye out before for this reason. Because of the trouble they have caused on my boards, I view each and every new person whom registers on my board before they will be validated. I also set an extra field where they have to write in before their registration will go through. A lot of other board on the internet are going through this similar method so that they don't have this problem.

Running and moderating message boards are well worth it as this is the easiest way to communicate with everyone and by having a community in this sense, everyone can help each other out when they have a question or just want to hang out with everyone.  No matter with all the hastle of running a board, I still feel that it is well worth the effort.