The Power of Forums

Something that an overwhelmingly large majority of consumers overlook is the power of a good internet forum. I myself didn't realize the vast amount of knowledge contained within good online forums until I joined the Mac community. By no means is the Mac community the only online community, as there are forums for basically anything you could ever imagine...

Forums are where a wealth of information on the Internet is. You can ask a question (of course searching the forums beforehand to see if someone asked the same question already) and have answers from people who have actual real world experience.

Obviously you are going to get a lot of crappy forums, and even within a good forum you are going to get a lot of crappy posts and topics (Witness the ridiculous arguments that insue after any Mac announcement on any Mac forum), but after weeding through the bad, you will be left with a large amount of priceless information.

Forums contain a lot of information that isn't available anywhere else...

Example: My wife's factory car stereo broke. When replacing it with a junkyard stereo, the new factory stereo thought it was stolen, so it wouldn't play CD's. (A feature known as Theftlock) Now, we could have obviously taken it to a dealer, and had them reset the stereo. But at what cost? And at what loss of precious time?

Enter the Google search. This led her brother and I to a forum. In the forum a consumer asked the same question we had, "How do I reset the stereo?" In the forum was a response from a forum member who had firsthand knowledge. He layed out step by step instructions, and it was a few minutes later that we had an unlocked, working stereo.

Could such knowledge be used by theives? Quite possibly... (Although a thief stealing factory stereos is missing the point of being a thief...) But any knowledge could be used as such...

Forums contain a ton of valuable knowledge.