Table Tennis Talk Online Forum Open for Discussions

Table Tennis Talk, a new online discussion forum primarily centering around the discussion of the Olympic sport of Table Tennis, officially launched as of September 21.

Using the free "high powered, fully scalable, and highly customizable Open Source bulletin board package" known as phpBB, Table Tennis Talk offers over a dozen specific forums, including forums centering on "tournaments", "equipment", regionality, and more.

Currently, there are a few, relatively well-known online avenues of discussion, including the About.com Table Tennis board, (Ed. Note - Table Tennis Dayton website offers an XML news stream from the About.com Table Tennis forum, as seen right.) the Delphi Forums USA Table Tennis Forum, the non-HTML, usenet based, rec.sport.table-tennis newsgroup, and a few lesser known forums nationally and around the world.

Despite the various discussion forum avenues, Table Tennis Dayton webmaster, Bill McLaughlin, decided to launch a "competing" discussion group.

"I wasn't happy with the amount of advertisements and extraneous baggage surrounding the core discussion threads on other forum websites, and have always preferred the layout and format of forum solutions such as phpBB. It's simply easier and more logical for users, regardless of the subject."

The price is certainly right for all parties. The phpBB software is free to use and there is no charge to the forum registrant. A simple sign-up process is required for complete access to the forums, but logging in as a "guest" is also possible. Other interesting features include customized avatars, or pictures, representing the user, email notification of responses to user posts, and of course the hopeful desire to obtain answers to questions and responses to discussions. There's even an "Off-Topic" forum that allows users to vent or discourse on non-Table Tennnis subjects.

Said McLaughlin, "Table Tennis players are pretty passionate about the game. I'd like to see it reflect in this forum."

Judging by the various online forums currently available, that's a shot we'd like to see made.

Discuss this article in the online forum Table Tennis Talk