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Common concepts in the XenForo Admin Control Panel

Some concepts and principles are used throughout the XenForo system, so having an understanding of some of these will save you some head-scratching later.

Naming​

For historical reasons, some concepts and content types may be referred to with different names at different times and in some cases separate items may share a name.

The most important of these are described here.

The Forum​

When referring to the area of your site created by the XenForo software, we may variously refer to it using the following terms:

  • Your forum
  • Your board
  • Your installation
  • Your site

While it is common to refer to a XenForo discussion website as a forum, this term is also used to describe individual sections of your discussion site as described below.

The term board hails from the origins of forums in pre-Internet bulletin board systems (BBS).

Normally we would avoid using the term site, as this would refer to the entirety of your website rather than just the parts created by XenForo.

Forums​

Confusingly, your forum may be subdivided using the node tree into several forums, each of which is a container for threads. Each of these forums will have a title, describing the subject matter of the content within.

Threads​

Threads are individual discussions within a forum. In other software systems and services they are also known as discussions or topics, but threads is the term used within XenForo.

Posts​

Individual messages within threads are known as posts. As with threads, these items are also known as messages or replies, but within XenForo we call them posts.