So if you go away for a week, what is your strategy to catch up? Do you really read through pages and pages of posts? Rep for the best strategy to catch up.
Simple. I just separate everything I've missed into two piles: 1) Useful, interesting stuff. 2) 10,000 threads asking when the next bloody page rank update will be, is this PR prediction tool reliable, 'How Can I increase PR Double Quick?!!', etc. etc. etc. I read 1) and scroll over 2). You can do the same by simply never visiting the 'Search Engines ---> Google' forum
go to "user profile" of shoemoney, minstrel, MattUk or some other nice member and click on "find all post of this user" they only post on thread that has value..i had been doing that for a while