I'll tell you how I make a distinction. I call those "listservs" of
emails distributed from a place like Yahoo Groups a "Forum" - for the
free exchange of ideas. It is usually less confusing to the newbie.
They have seen forums on CSPAN.

For a Group, there are additional benefits, just like our group === EPCC
at YahooGroups.com
The Group has sophisticated controls that go beyond xeroxing emails for
distribution. At the group, you can see if someone is online (signed
in) from the group page, and most groups have an event calendar, and a
files area, and an area for useful links, all easily maintained by it's
members.

And within the Yahoo Group, you can specify your profile info for people
to know you better. (I think the Yahoo Group is a typical group, and in
the era of Web 2.0, there are now more sophisticated groups like Linked
In, where the group is a trust-based validated linkage of email
addresses and profiles.)

For a "portal", once you have a Yahoo account, you can create a home
page at Yahoo at a page called my.yahoo.com. It centralizes (does a
Mashup) of a lot of information services on a single page. For
instance, on mine, once I sign-in to my.yahoo.com, I get a personalized
page of weather in cities I like, a brief rundown of my inbox at my
yahoo mail account, travel deals to cities I watch, news bulletins for
subjects I am interested in, my favorite TV channels for tonight, the
stock symbols I follow daily, ... those kinds of things.

So the three things -- Forum, Group and Portal -- all found on Yahoo,
give you a lot of utility as an individual or a group of friends. And
good ole Yahoo Groups (the acquired eGroups.com company) has had these
functions since about 2004.



-=================- Bob L wrote:
Computers make it easy to join various groups and forums.
What is the difference between a group and a forum?

I ask this because the groups I have gone to use what I
think is a forum for discussing their concerns. For me it is
a bit confusing they seem so much a like. Could someone
explain this?