Σκοπός της παρούσας διπλωματικής είναι να αναγνωρίσει βασικά και αντιπροσωπευτικά λογισμικά υποδομής για φόρουμ και να τα αξιολογήσει. Ομαδοποιούνται τα χαρακτηριστικά τους με σκοπό τη δημιουργία ενός συγκριτικού πίνακα, ο οποίος προκύπτει έπειτα από ενδελεχή μελέτη των παροχών, των χαρακτηριστικών και των δυνατοτήτων του εκάστοτε λογισμικού. Θα καταλήξει σε συμπεράσματα που θα είναι χρήσιμα για όποιον ενδιαφέρεται να μάθει για τα φόρουμ, να έρθει σε επαφή με τον τρόπο δημιουργίας και να επιλέξει εν τέλει αυτό το λογισμικό που τον αντιπροσωπεύει καλύτερα. / The intention of this paper is to recognize, rate and compare the most common web forum softwares.

Each day, millions of people ask questions and search for answers on the World Wide Web. Due to this, the Internet has grown to a world wide database of questions and answers, accessible to almost everyone. Since this database is so huge, it is hard to find out whether a question has been answered or even asked before. As a consequence, users are asking the same questions again and again, producing a vicious circle of new content which hides the important information. One platform for questions and answers are Web forums, also known as discussion boards. They present discussions as item streams where each item contains the contribution of one author. These contributions contain questions and answers in human readable form. People use search engines to search for information on such platforms. However, current search engines are neither optimized to highlight individual questions and answers nor to show which questions are asked often and which ones are already answered. In order to close this gap, this thesis introduces the \\emph{Effingo} system. The Effingo system is intended to extract forums from around the Web and find question and answer items. It also needs to link equal questions and aggregate associated answers. That way it is possible to find out whether a question has been asked before and whether it has already been answered. Based on these information it is possible to derive the most urgent questions from the system, to determine which ones are new and which ones are discussed and answered frequently. As a result, users are prevented from creating useless discussions, thus reducing the server load and information overload for further searches. The first research area explored by this thesis is forum data extraction. The results from this area are intended be used to create a database of forum posts as large as possible. Furthermore, it uses question-answer detection in order to find out which forum items are questions and which ones are answers and, finally, topic detection to aggregate questions on the same topic as well as discover duplicate answers. These areas are either extended by Effingo, using forum specific features such as the user graph, forum item relations and forum link structure, or adapted as a means to cope with the specific problems created by user generated content. Such problems arise from poorly written and very short texts as well as from hidden or distributed information.

The aim of the study is to elucidate what enables positive attitudes towards buying sex. The study has a posthumanist approach and the data is gathered trough hidden observations of a Swedish web forum dedicated to discussions of prostitution. The theoretical frame that is used in the study consist of concepts from the material feminists Karen Barads and Donna J. Haraways theories and Niels van Doorns argument of the embodiment of virtual texts. A theoretical inspired thematic analysis is used to examine the data from the observations of the web forum. The study shows that positive attitudes towards buying sex are given space and permanence though a variety of intra-actions between material and human agents. At the same time the result of the intra-actions is that the positive attitudes get mediated and endorsed, which enables positive attitudes towards buying sex. In addition to that, the intra-action between material and human agents creates normative understandings about buying sex and prostitution, which also enables these attitudes. In conclusion, the study shows that the enablement of positive attitudes towards buying sex is created through intra-action between not only human agents, instead the material shows to have a significant part in the enablement of positive attitudes towards buying sex.

This study aims to discover the perceptions of the visually disabled students at a public university in Ankara, Turkey for attending and participating in an online communication and discussion environment on the Web to access information and establish social relationships with others. The purpose of this research is six folds: (1) to investigate the current status of the visually disabled university students at a public university in Ankara, Turkey for accessing and using computers and the Internet, (2) to learn the kind of web sites that those students prefer to visit on the Internet, (3) to discover the topics and subject they prefer to see in the Web forum that will be designed and developed for them, (4) to identify the topics and subjects in the Web forum that those visually disabled university students mostly visited for reading, replying and adding new titles under them, (5) to show the effects of the Web forum on the participants for accesing information and establishing social relationships with others, (6) to learn the views and opinions of those visually v disabled university students about that Web forum after actively participating and spending meaningful time in it. In this study, mixed research method is used. The participants of this study were the visually disabled students of a public university in Ankara, Turkey and found by the researcher with the help of an academician colleague working in the Special Education Department under the Faculty of Education in that university. In that university, there were totally 39 visually disabled students and 36 of them accepted to be enrolled in this study on a voluntary basis. Within the scope of the study, &ldquo / EnabledForum - EngelsizForum&rdquo / was designed and developed by the researcher as a communication and discussion environment for those visually disabled university students for enabling them to establish social relationships with others via submitted posts for the topics and subjects of the forum. Moreover, this forum helped those visually disabled university students for accessing up-to-date information from the Web based sources. Finally, the usage logs of the &ldquo / EnabledForum - EngelsizForum&rdquo / helped the researcher to analyse and report which topics and subjects were mostly interested by those visually disabled university students.