I'm afraid to enter the message boards. No one will ever know you're reading through our message boards unless you post a message. You can spend 24 hours a day on them, and no one will know you're there. Of course, we hope you'll jump in and participate at some point, but you never have to. Our message boards are not chat rooms.
Internet chats occur in real-time.
The people conversing are doing so at the same time, at that very moment. And they usually only converse one sentence at a time. Message boards are a very different beast. They're more like bulletin boards, where people can post a message that's a single sentence, or many paragraphs. The boards are organized by topic, and lots of messages accumulate and remain there.