"welcome" message sent to newcomers (attn: Marc)

[fspGTD]

First off, Marc: thank you for your recent efforts with improving and maintaining the board!  

Now, my question: do we have a message that is sent to "newcomers"?

If so, here are some suggestion to add to it, (if they are not already there):
* Use the search feature before asking questions, to see if they have been answered already.  To hone on in the most relevant hits, add multiple words and set the option to "search for all terms".  The search engine on this board functions very quickly and very effectively.
* It is recommended that you include your location in your profile.  If you are skittish about revealing personal info on the internet, at least tell us what state / province and/or country you reside in.  Different vehicles were made for different markets worldwide, so this not only lets others know your culture but also what car you have or what market you are in.
* Don't ask questions about your specific engine or vehicle without giving us the pertinent information of what kind it is.  If in doubt, include what year and model car you are talking about, what is the vehicle platform (if known), what type of engine it has, any other pertinent information that may be helpful in answering your question.  Setting this information in your signature is recommended as it ensures communication of these details with each post.

[RedRotors]

Hi Guys,

Sorry for the delay, i just got back my internet connection.. You have a nice idea Jake and if you want to proceed, i have no problem with this..

One thing that it could be cool to have , is a 'validation' section for new registred member. I explain. We have a lot of junk user that register to the board ( fortunatly, i keep track and delete them ) I already saw on a board that you have to enter 5 digits written in a fuzzy picture.. just to be sure that you'r not a bot.. It's hard to explain but im sure Mr S. know what i mean..

Marc/

[fspGTD]

I like the idea of having the car/engine type under the location like you suggest...

As for making the location "required", I think if someone doesn't want to enter it, then they would be forced to just enter bogus info, and that would end up being worse than just letting them keep the field blank.  So I think we should keep it optional, but state in the welcome message our recommendation on how to set these fields to effectively participate in the forum, IE: as discussed above.

Another idea I wanted to get your guys thoughts on here is the idea of restricting newbies until a certain post number is reached...  In another forum I use (www.maxima.org) I found that they don't allow newbies to make new threads until their post count exceeds a certain number - pretty sure it's 10 posts.  There are many thing I dislike about that forum that I believe we are doing better (very annoying use of stickies, slow server response time, poor search engine function, way too complicated signatures with frequantly very large-graphics, etc), but the newbie restriction aspect I find may have positive qualities in that it seems to guide new folks into reading existing threads and searching for relevant content before making new threads (which for many newbies have already been covered before) and so this setup may be a good thing.  I don't know, but was interested in hearing what others thought about this idea and if it may be good to apply to the GTD forum?

Regardless of the newbie restriction idea, certainly just communicating the "ground rules" to new users in the welcome message will be a big step in the right direction.  Thanks again for your guys help on making this a better forum guys!