  Humans make decisions based on the information they obtain from several major
sources, among which the comments of others in Internet forums play an
increasing role. Such forums cover a wide spectrum of topics and represent an
essential tool in choosing the best products, manipulating views or optimizing
our decisions regarding a number of aspects of our everyday life. However, many
forums have extremely controversial topics and contents including those which
radicalize the readers or spread information about dangerous products and ideas
(e.g., drugs, weapons or aggressive ideologies). These just mentioned
activities are taking place mainly on the so-called "dark web" allowing the
hiding of the identity of members using dark forums. We use network theoretical
approaches to analyze the data we obtained by studying the connectivity
features of the members and the threads within a wide selection of forums
(including dark and semi-dark) and establish several characteristic behavioral
patterns. Our findings reveal both common and rather different features in the
two types of behavior. In particular, we show that the various distributions of
quantities, like the activity of the commenters, the dynamics of the threads
(defined using their lifetime) or the degree distributions corresponding to the
three major types of forums we have investigated display characteristic
deviations. This knowledge can be useful, for example, in identifying an
activity typical for the dark web when it appears on the public web (since the
public web can be accessed and used much more easily).
