About the sub domain name of the board: is this a minor error?

[Hyson]

Recently I noticed that Invision Power has changed its forum domain from forums.invisionpower.com to community.invisionpower.com. This reminds me of a minor grammatic issue of the use of the word forum. I checked the dictionary which says forum is usually singular.So is this part of the reasons Invision Power turned forums to community as the new sub-domain, besides a strategic consideration that the board should reflect more of mutual interaction between Invision Power and clients?

vBB's community has been using 'forum', the singular form in their server path, but it seems that they do not have a sub-domain like forum.vbulletin.com (they only set a forward function).

Please forgive me if I asked a stupid question. What is the better sub-domain, forum or forums? I found there were a lot of alternatives such as bbs., forum., forums., community. and even luntan. as sub-domain names.

Let me add some snapshots below.


I just took a look at XenForo's board, and found they are using forums, the plural form, while Invision Power are different.

[Mark]

Forum refers to one forum (as opposed to many) but the definition of forum itself is more general:

— n , pl -rums , -ra 1. a meeting or assembly for the open discussion of subjects of public interest 2. a medium for open discussion, such as a magazine 3. a public meeting place for open discussion 4. a court; tribunal

So one could say that the entire site is a forum in that it facilitates discussion, or you could equally say each individual (for lack of a better word) forum is as facilitates discussion for a particular subject.

Within our software to use the word "community" to reference the entire site since you could also have blogs, galleries, etc. and "forums" to represent the discussion forums (hence the "forums" tab in the navigation bar).

Ultimately though - it doesn't matter, there is no right or wrong way. Interestingly, "fora" is also an acceptable term for the plural of "forum" :)



In your screenshots - we're using it in the same context - we're using a table with "Forum" as the header of one of the columns (i.e. "this is the name of the forum") while XenForo are using it as a header for the entire table (i.e. "these are all our forums").