I treat forums as writing prompts. I've written long-form works based on questions, or discussions, or occasionally to debunk items.

This started as a comment in a G+ thread, _including_ the 37 footnotes: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/5l_8MqtVwLLvX_DabPjY-g

This got written (along with the research for the numbers) because I'd gotten sufficiently pissed off at zero-information-basis discussions on the topic: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/nAya9WqdemIoVuVWVOYQUQ

A re-share of a meme that struck me as slightly too-good-to-be-true inspired this: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morg...

Follow-ups to the Google numbers piece above inspired this: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...

I've also used forums to try out ideas I'm developing, solicit feedback, etc., etc.

Most of my writing is nonfiction and explores topics, or reports on findings based on explorations, usually of literature within one or more fields.

And I've considered shopping a few of these pieces around, though I've not yet done so.