The present study draws on e-discourse data from an online travel forum(i.e.the Aardvark Travel Forum) and examines the newly established online role relations encoded in the linguistic choices within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics.After examining the overall sociocultural context of the forum,the author finds that despite the lack of physical and nonverbal cues that may serve to reveal the preestablished social identities of the participants,a ranking system has been established to index online users’ level of participation and contribution in the forum;as a result,the basic rank-based online social roles are built up.These newly-established online social roles are often ignored by both social psychologists and sociolinguists who tend to focus on online interactants’ preexisting social roles such as gender and race/ethnicity.Therefore the present paper attempts to focus on the social roles newly constructed in the virtual world and sets out to examine the mood and speech functional selections manipulated in varied virtual situations to show how different role relations are negotiated in different situations in the forum.The linguistic analysis shows that power differential and social distance between the forum members can be manifested and inscribed in the linguistic choices and hence serves as linguistic evidence against the Cues-Filtered-Out(CFO) theory in social psychology,which claims that social hierarchy can be leveled out in the virtual life.The paper concludes that e-discourse is not left in a social vacuum,since it is clearly observed from a functional linguistic perspective that social hierarchy and rank-based social roles are well established and maintained in the forum discourse. The present study draws on e-discourse data from an online travel forum (iethe Aardvark Travel Forum) and examines the newly established online role relations encoded in the linguistic choices within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. After examining the overall sociocultural context of the forum, the author finds that despite the lack of physical and nonverbal cues that may serve to reveal the preestablished social identities of the participants, a ranking system has been established to index online users’ level of participation and contribution in the forum; as a result , the basic rank-based online social roles are built up. The newly-established online social roles are often ignored by both social psychologists and sociolinguists who tend to focus on online interactants’ pre -isting social roles such as gender and race / ethnicity.Therefore the present paper attempts to focus on the social roles newly constructed in the virtual world and sets out to examine the mood and sp eech functional selections manipulated in varied virtual situations to show how different role relations are negotiated in different situations in the forum. linguistic analysis shows that power differential and social distance between the forum members can be manifested and inscribed in the linguistic choices and therefore serves as linguistic evidence against the Cues-Filtered-Out (CFO) theory in social psychology, which claims that social hierarchy can be leveled out in the virtual life. The paper concludes that e-discourse is not left in a social vacuum, since it is clearly observed from a functional linguistic perspective that social hierarchy and rank-based social roles are well established and maintained in the forum discourse.