Now that the Forums are getting busier and with all kinds of conversations I thought it would be good to visit a few tips for navigating around them a little quicker. If you haven't had a chance to join in, click here to go to the Forums.

Once you go to the Forums page you'll notice three separate forums for different types of interaction: Instructions, Members Cafe, and Website Support Issues. Click on the forum you're interested in. We'll use "Conversations" since that's the busiest one.

Once you're there, you'll notice a few helpful tools:

1. At the top of the page there's a "breadcrumb trail" of links that tell you exactly where you are in the forums. If you're in the Conversations discussion board, you'll see a trail at the top that says "Home>>Forums>>Members Cafe." Any of these can be clicked in order to return to that portions of the forum.

2. By default, all topics are listed according to most recent activity. So whatever topic appears at the top should be the one with the most recent comment.

3. There are envelope icons on the right. Grey icons have no activity since your least visit, yellow icons have new comments; envelope icons that are stuffed with papers are the most active conversations.

4. The "replies" column shows you how many new comments are in that topic since your last visit.

5. The column headers at the top are dynamic. This means you can click these header titles to re-sort the forums by that category. For example, clicking on "Topic" will sort all the conversations alphabetically in ascending order. Click it again and they will be sorted in descending order. All the headers work this way. Clicking "Replies" will sort by either the most or least replies, and clicking "Created" will sort by oldest and most recent topics.

Using these tools can help you find the topics you're looking for faster and easier when you're participating in online discussions with you fellow twoshirts members. Have fun with it!