The structure is well known and well understood - though the origins of some of the terminology are lost in the mists of time. Who ever came up with the notion of your site being a forum, but these separate containers for related threads also being forums?
But back on topic, and we all know that visiting a forum (the second type) will usually show a list of threads ordered with the most recently updated near the top, and that clicking on any of those threads will show a page with the oldest post first and newer posts underneath and on subsequent pages.
Bending discussion forums to varying purposes
Over the years, forum administrators have been inventive and used the simple messages-in-named-containers structure of forums to build all sorts of content - let's look at the XenForo community as an example.First, we have announcements and these "Have you seen" threads. These are quite focused on the initial post (or first few posts in some HYS threads), with these posts containing a lot of information... a bit like an article with subsequent comments.
Then we have the suggestions forums, where we ask people to up-vote the ideas they're interested in.
There are also support forums where people are looking for answers to questions or solutions to problems.
And of course there are also forums for general chat and discussions, which most closely fit the original notion of a discussion thread and where you can't really say the threads fit the same model as the other types.
Up until now, these forums and the threads within have all been displayed the same way.
But not any more
With XenForo 2.2, we are introducing the concept of Forum and thread types. This is a massive change with enormous ramifications for forums. Today, we're only really going to talk about the admin and user experience of the new systems, but in a few days we're going to follow up with a developer-focused HYS where we will talk about what's going on behind the scenes here, because we're really rather excited about the potential it unlocks.There is a lot to talk about, but let's just dive into some examples...
tl;dr
We're prefer you to read all the details below, but if you just want the juicy bits:
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That Articles forum and thread type is going to change how I set up forums from now on--it's a game changer for us.
. You guys just gave admins limitless ways to present (group/create) content. I never seen this before, and never even considered this or thought it possible. XF just transformed forums to how they should be now, and how they should be into the future. 
