Ridings & Gefen (2004) “groups of people with common interests and practices that communicate regularly and for some duration in an organized way over the Internet through a common location or mechanism” (p. 3).
I kinda agree with the point that the communication needs to be “regular” and “for some duration”. But the communication within individual threats is often temporary in nature. People usually come to thematically organized sub-forums to browse and select interesting threats to read and comment. Opinion leaders are usually recognized within the boundaries of sub-forums. Many people are loyal to more than one sub-forums. So I’m not sure threads should count as communities while sub-forums and/or the whole website don’t.
