New author, independent research, scope of publishing
I think there are many questions here;

Independent Publishing? It is possible to publish your work as an independent researcher.  see this question "Does one need to be affiliated with a university to publish papers?". For further confirmation, I would suggest to directly contact the responsible personnel of the conference or journal.

Forums(Journal vs Conference)?  Journals are usually assumed to be of high standard. However, this might not be true always.Some conferences have equal or higher standard than journals; they only accept high quality works. However, you should be able to find many conferences with a track record of accepting publications with varying qualities.

How to find the quality of a forum? If you want to find out the quality of a forum, check their previous publications and try judging their quality. You can also look for people who have published there, if they are expert in your field then it could be a high quality journal or conference. 

What forum suits my work? You know the quality of your work therefore aiming for forums inline with the quality of your work will save you a lot of time. 
Otherwise, you can discuss with an expert (a professor or researcher in academia) who knows the forums and their qualities. If they can read your work that would make it easy to find the matching forum.

These are just my suggestions, rest you know what is best for you. Good luck!