US Patent 10116599 Topic categorized instant message communication

Techniques are presented for defining, for an online conference session, a plurality of pages, which may be preconfigured, based on information received from a moderating participant having administrative privileges for the conference session, each page corresponding to a discussion topic of a text-based conversation. A request is received from the moderating participant to select one of the plurality of pages. After a page has been selected, the selected page is synchronized such that the selected page is displayed to the moderating participant and each of the one or more other participants, and subsequent text-based communications are displayed in the display area of the selected page.