Forums can be a major pain. Forums are addictive, drain enormous amounts of time, and are overflowing with people who don’t know what they are talking about. In some cases, they have devolved into adolescent chat rooms. (I was just reminded of that this weekend when I banned the same troll twice a day from one of the forums I own.)

On the other hand, forums are, hands down, the best place online to discover and share new ideas. No forums, and today I would be an employee. All of my inspiration, ideas, and initial direction in online business came from forums.

The experience of forum use is like searching for gold. Once every few months you’ll hit the jackpot and discover an incredibly valuable piece of information or a business contact. This reward system creates an addictive situation similar to gambling. Rather than money, you exchanged your time. (its worth noting any type of digital or printed medium can do this to you.)

As with any activity, how do you practice consumption with moderation? What is the line past which you are wasting your time?

It is in your best interest to be able to recognize and remember who is posting (so you can judge their credibility based on past posts.) Just the same, it is important for others to recognize and identify you so they can properly associate your advice with your identity (that presumes you give good advice.) For these reasons I have preferred to stick to smaller forums like Websitepublisher.net rather than frequent the big ones such as Sitepoint, Digitalpoint, and Webmasterworld.

So just how do you extract maximum benefit while minimizing wasted time?

Here are a few things I (try to) do:

1. Identify people that consistently give good advice. Bookmark a link to “Find all posts by X user”

2. Read thread titles as fast as possible by clicking on “New Posts.” Its surprisingly easily to keep up with even the most busy forums this way.

3. Skip over off topic posts.

4. Resist the urge to contribute unless you have something that will be valuable to readers — and when you do, keep it to a minimum. It is (generally) in your interest to post the best and most concise information to your own blog.

5. Completely ignore, or even block, idiots. Don’t even waste your time acknowledging their existence with a flame.

6. Read no more than one forum daily. Everything else should be no more than once a week, or less. If you are coming back twice or more in one day, its time to book a long trip to the Caribbean.

This is all common sense stuff. You don’t really have to read & post on forums. I have been scaling back my forum activity along with blog posting. Heck, I might even take a forum vacation one of these months.