A Framework for Exploring Gray Web Forums: Analysis of Forum-Based Communities in Taiwan

This paper examines the “Gray Web Forums” in Taiwan. We study their characteristics and develop an analysis framework for assisting investigations on forum communities. Based on the statistical data collected from online forums, we found that the relationship between a posting and its responses is highly correlated to the forum nature. In addition, hot threads extracted based on the proposed metric can be used to assist analysts in identifying illegal or inappropriate contents. Furthermore, members’ roles and activities in a virtual community can be identified by member level analysis.