By Sean McMains
(Answers from Seth Dillingham:)
The short answer for zone: it stands for "zone of control".
Here's an overview of how it all looks:
One server contains:
any number of zones, which contain:
any number of members
any number of groups (of members)
any number of conversations, which contain
any number of messages
any number of pages
Preferences (settings, properties) can belong to ANY of the above.
Anyway, the difference between a zone and a conversation is... well, they're
really nothing alike. A zone is a container, it holds members,
conversations, and groups.
A conversation is where messages are stored and used. It's simplest analogy
is "a website", but that's also an over-simplification, because a
conversation doesn't actually NEED to have any web interface at all: it
could be used solely as a mailing list, or a members-only newsgroup, or
accessed via whatever other I/O system is provided.
Topics are simple: they're just messages that aren't replies to other
messages. It's just a shorthand term, and it's one that I don't personally
find very useful. I never look at the topics pages. Others find them very
useful, and actually base a large part of their discussion groups around the
"topics" and "threads" models.
Topics themselves have nothing to do with web pages, though. Again, a topic
is just a message that isn't a reply to another message. It can have
replies, which makes it the first message in a thread.
The "topics page" is just a listing of the topics in a given conversation.
It's as if you performed a search for all of the messages in a conversation
which aren't replies to other messages.
