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"Web" in the strict sense? Not really, as the "World Wide Web" wasn't invented until ~1990, and the protocol and software weren't made public until 1993[1].
So there weren't a lot of HTTP/HTML based "web" sites between 1991-1994, and probably even fewer "forum" type sites. BUT... in a more colloquial sense of how "web" might be used retrospectively, as sort of a loose synonym for "online", then absolutely. Going back well into the 1980's, and then into the 1990's, we had all sorts of online services, including discussion forums. There were the big services like Compuserve, The Well, AOL, Delphi, GEnie, Prodigy, etc. And then there were individual small dial-up BBS's[2] by the bushel-load. At their peak there were many thousands of them in the US alone. There were entire magazines printed and distributed that were effectively nothing but lists of dial-up numbers for BBS's, and magazines like Computer Shopper had big sections dedicated to listing those as well. And then there was, as you mention, Usenet. So yeah, even back in 1991, there were plenty of forums that might not have strictly been part of "the web", but that someone in contemporary times might casually describe as a "web forum". [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system |