A Bulletin Board is world wide web based application that allows people to post messages and share information. Bulletin Boards have been available on the Internet for a considerable time and continually improving with modern Bulletin Boards being written in PHP and CGI and using MySql databases to store information.

They are also referred to as 'forums'. The most popular bulletin board software which costs a fee is vBulletin, and the most popular for free is phpBB. One major problem with alot of free bulletin boards is security. It's quite often that security flaws are found and exploited, which can render a bulletin board inactive, or worse case scenario totally defunct. Which is quite a drawback, if a community has been formed and thousands and threads gone forever.

There is pretty much a bulletin board for any major subject, and for popular subjects countless forums. Professional boards like vBulletin can usually had millions of posts without breaking sweat, the problem with free boards, is that they may not have been thoroughly tested if they become popular. Quite a few boards also have conversion tools, so that you can convert a phpbb database to a vbulletin one.