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. So you can check in once a week and see what new posts have been made. I don't know how to use the boards. It's really quite simple.