Forums are a great place to discuss many different topics; you do however have to be careful. People rely on the fact that forums are anonymous when they post comments. However if you post personal information it is not hard for people to find out your real identity. This can lead to all kinds of problems for you down the road.
The big reason that you have to make sure that you are very careful with personal information on forums is to protect yourself from identity theft. Forums are public places, anybody can access them. That means that anything that you put on the forum is available for anybody to see. There are a lot of very clever people who can use any personal information that you provide to steal your identity and open credit accounts in your name. It does not take a lot of information for them to be able to do this so you have to be very careful.
The other big reason that you want to be careful about personal information is because there are a lot of things that are said on forums that you probably are not going to want people to know that you have said. There are several issues here; the biggest is that discussions on forums often end up denigrating to arguments that can get quite personal. Most people rely on the fact that forums are anonymous to allow them to say things that they would never otherwise say. Having somebody be able to determine your actually identity could lead to problems.
You also need to be aware that the things that you say on forums is going to be archived and there for anybody to see. This is becoming a problem for a lot of people since potential employers; landlords and many other people will routinely do a search on your name before they hire you or rent you an apartment. If your identity becomes known everything that you have said on the forum will be available for them to see. Most people have said things on a forum at some point that they would not want anybody else to know about.
Making sure that you protect your personal information on forums is not all that hard; it just takes a little bit of common sense. The problem is that during the course of the discussion people can get so caught up in what they are saying that they forget to be careful about their personal information. This is the kind of mistake that you can't afford to make. It is a good idea to stop and read what you have written before you go ahead and post it. This will make sure that you don't accidently post something online that you will regret later.