I was recently asked via twitter

@mandville how do u cope with the volume @ joomla forums?

My response was priority vs speed. decent docs and cut and paste helps! But let me explain that a bit more.

My first trip into the forums is usually the areas I moderate, mainly the Security (both 1.5 & 1.0) and Showcase. After sifting the reports, I look into the new posts checking for anything breaking the forum rules/community guidelines eg: signatures, self promotion or the latest host-any-file links. Obviously there will be somewhere a hacker kudos  or "contains sensitive info" post that will need to be edited out.

These are what I consider priority posts. Included in here would be the topics that require a bit of background research “but” nearly every answer can be found on the docs.joomla.org or already posted in the forums.

The security moderators are always accused of being a bit free with copy and paste, but we have a nice library of information and tools built into the community written guides so we can easily c&p the details for a user to provide us with more information to help them sort through their problems.

I then move on to the “speed” aspect where I can usually answer a post in one or two lines (mostly using copy and paste from the docs.joomla.org!)

It is always good to read a topic if you don't know the answer (sometimes even I dont) and then suggest that is put into the docs for other community members to learn about.

The forum has two nice links I use a lot, view your posts and the new, view unread posts and I do follow the twitter feed for #joomla so I can see whats going on.

So to sum up I would say that the docs.joomla.org site overseen by Chris Davenport (recent j&B docs junkie winner – with yours truly shortlisted) is a must visit when your bored and pop in to topics you wouldn't consider visiting and see what you can learn.

Other WG I deal with are the JSST, the T&L team , http://people.joomla.org and https://community.joomla.org