The most historic day for Helium's message boards was April 3, 2008. That's when 777 different users logged in on the same day to read posts left by other Helium users. Helium has over 130,000 registered users, and you can start interacting with them on Helium's message boards. Remember that it's a community, and everyone gets a chance to speak and be heard. And sometimes your questions may even be answered by one of Helium's executive officers!
Want to get the most out of posting on Helium's message boards? Here's how.
Access the message boards by clicking the word "Community" which appears at the bottom of most pages on Helium.com. But notice that at the bottom of the forum's main page are handy statistics about activity on the boards. Not only will it display the record number of users for a single day, it will also tell you how many users visited the board today. And there's even a handy list of which Helium users have been most active within the last hour! This is useful, because when posting to the forums, you'll want to get a response. Using this list helps determine which topics are most active!
There's other useful statistics that are also hidden at the bottom of the page. (As of this writing, more than half a million messages have been posted to Helium's message boards, and more than 40,000 different topics.) And if you only want to read the most recent posts, there's even a special link! (This is important, because some topics on the board are more than a year old. Post a message in an old topic, and you may discover that you're the only person still reading it!)
On the main index page, every topic displays the title of the last post and the name of the person who posted it - but watch out for a glitch in the dates! Helium synchronizes their clocks to Greenwich Mean Time, which are based on the time zones in London, England. This means that the time of the post displayed will be off by eight hours for a Helium user in California. And while some posts may be described as appearing "Today," that could change in the middle of the afternoon - since it's midnight in London! If you're posting a comment that includes a reference to the time of the post, make sure that you actually understand how Helium calculates time!
Clicking on a user's name takes you to their profile page, where you can read their user profile, check out their past articles, and send them a private message. (And some user profiles even include a picture!) Sometimes the best advice about posting is: don't. It may be better to send a private message to a user, rather than leaving comments online where everybody can read them. But if you ever wish you could take back a post - you can! Click the word "modify," and you can change what you wrote into something more diplomatic. The biggest problem users have with posting comes when the "modify" and "reply" links don't appear. But it turns out there's a simple explanation: the links won't appear unless users are logged in to their Helium account!
But here's the handiest tip I ever heard for using the message boards on Helium: the red letters on the left of each post are all hyperlinks that you can click on. (Even the user's rating star on the left of a post contains a link, which will take you to a page explaining the formula for Helium's rating and writing stars.) Besides writing stars and rating stars, the left side of the page will display "board status" stars, which increase as users post more messages - so you'll know if the person you're responding to is a Helium novice or an expert. (And the red letters also display the number of posts a user has made - and if you click on it, you'll get a special page showing every post that user has made!)
That's especially handy when you're looking at one of your own posts. You can go back and read all of your past posts on Helium - and click on their links to see if anybody's followed up! That's probably the best part about posting on Helium's community forums. You'll discover lots of great Helium users who are sharing their own experiences.