Discussion Forum

The NBS discussion forum is the first project of the Nile Basin Society. Building on the success of the Nile River mailing list, it was essential to move forward to supply just the information that a certain person is interested in. The following are the identified limitations of the mailing list:

Photo Gallery No classification of posts is possible. Posts are presented sequentially by time of post.
All posts are sent to all members. Volume is sometimes high and any user cannot be interested in all posts.
Users who subscribed through sending an e-mail, usually find it difficult to register with the mailing list server to be able to view the archives, download files or simply to change the delivery options, e.g. from individuals mails to a single daily e-mail containing all posts (misleadingly called "daily digest").

The discussion forum, in addition to avoiding the above limitations, has the following advantages:

Encourages dialogue: Users do not only receive posts made in their area of interest by e-mail, but they can also respond to the e-mail, following specific instructions in the body of the e-mail, and their reply gets posted to the discussion forum and distributed to all registered users of the topic.
Encourages exchange of information: Any person, even guests - i.e. not registered users - can post their opinions/news. In fact, we do allow anonymous posting so as to encourage users to post sensitive information with no fear of retaliation.
Easy exchange of documents: Any document can be attached to a post. Also pictures, videos and audio files can be attached.
Administrative uses: The Discussion Forum makes it easy for the Nile Basin Society to conduct its business through 'private' topics for the board of directors as well as members. This builds on the above identified advantages.

We believe that e-mail is the main communication means in most of the Nile Basin. The discussion forum allows us to effectively communicate with all users particularly the Nile Basin.

We hope that the discussion forum will act as a source of information to researchers, activists as well as governments and international agencies. Older posts are archived and can be searched.

The best demonstration of the discussion forum is by actually subscribing to it and experimenting with its features.

More information about the software used are available here.