RSS is a format for syndicating news and webblogs. RSS is very widespread with many websites and most major news websites offering live RSS feeds.

You can acquire RSS Reader software, that will check your subscribed RSS feeds, on a periodic time interval, which you can set. You can then read that content without opening your browser.

Our forums have the ability to feed their contents to these RSS Readers. 

Simply acquire a RSS Reader program.  There are many to choose from.  Search for RSS @ http://www.download.com.  Each one of these applications operates in a slightly different manner.  So, read the instructions of the application and you can have these forums fed to your reader.