Re: Confusing
My philosophy is everyone starts knowing nothing we all know varying things and should share to help each other. Whilst a lot of what I think you want to know would be helped if you can by installing BuddyPress on a a site somewhere and exploring or trying the test site (http://testbp.org/). Let me see if I can help a little.
Traditional forums would be what bbpress (https://bbpress.org/) would be your solution for. Now, in saying that BuddyPress uses bbpress for forums. So it’s a mutual use in sense of BuddyPress.
The way groups work are yes by having forums. The way I like to think of them are hang outs / clubhouses where there is a link between members and they can discuss. I may have an interest in dogs (the main site) but I may only want to talk about dog training or labradors (those would be groups). That’s a bit of a broad explanation but hopefully gets the notion across.
Now can you have traditional forums – yes with bbpress but groups is a more segemented talking.
Others may have their own breakdowns of it but to me this is what groups and forums are in simple terms.
Some more links to share with you though that may help it make a bit more sense:
https://buddypress.org/about/story/
And here is from the buddypress.org home page about groups:
“Powerful public, private or hidden groups allow your users to break the discussion down into specific topics. Extend groups with your own custom features using the group extension API.”
And about forums:
“Full powered discussion forums built directly into groups allow for more conventional in-depth conversations.”
