When you are done surfing the forums, select "Mark ALL forums read" or individually within each forum. That way, when you come back in to surf, you will get an easy visual as to which, if any, forums have new posts to check out. Beats reading dates and times!
Don't forget, you can subscribe to a thread to receive an automatic email notification when someone replies to it.
And bookmark this site for easy instructions on html basics. You can use this to figure out how to make cool signatures and jazz up your posts with html (if you are so inclined)!
www.geocities.com/~annabella/basics.html