Discussion forums?

Ever tried them? By far, the best experience and worst experience I've had while looking for help were both found on forums. Forums are dynamic websites that you can go to, sign in, and leave messages with anyone who is a member. If you're looking for something specific, there's no better place than a well-traveled forum.

How can you find a well traveled forum? Tricky, considering most of that information is restricted to webmasters. A few tips to help you find the right community, though-


Go down the list. If you see one person who has made the last post in all of the columns, it's not a forum, it's a blog. If this person is updating regularly, great. You can go to them for whatever help you need, but expect that this will become less and less traveled without the right kind of traffic.

Check content. A forum with a great post count, but filled with spam, has been abandoned to the internet's lowest form of life, spammers. The most you can hope to find from this type of forum is a virus.

Warning levels/censorship. This is a personal pet peeve of mine. If the group over-moderates its content, it's going to feel a lot like being herded through a nazi death camp. Take what information you can get from them and run like hell.

Finally, if you've never run into him, you can expect to find him on a forum. It's the guy who takes things WAY too personally, and hates your guts. He probably hopes you'll kill yourself. People like this are all around, and it's the disconnected community of the internet that makes it that much easier for him to hate you. It's the internet. It's not serious business, so by all means mess with him back.