Okay, I've been thinking about how to solve this "New users with obnoxious questions" dilemma we appear to have.

We're all aggravated by new users that ask questions like "HOW DO I BUY," "HOW DO I CHANGE WEPS," "HOW INSTALL MODZ??"

Its annoying, and some of us don't handle them as politely as we should.

Here is my suggestion: A User Welcoming Committee. This is a volunteer group of people that contribute to introduce new users to some of the aspects of gameplay.

I figured this would also give us an opportunity to author tutorials and instructions for common questions like a detailed explanation and video demonstration of the aspects of Cortex Command. We could easy combine the Wiki and YouTube embedding to create tutorial documents to send to newbs.

Here is how I invision this working: Five or so experienced polite users volunteer for this Committee. Each of them monitors the user list for new users and new users without posts, and a volunteer introduces the new user to things like forum rules, how the game works, and how to install mods and the like.

Thoughs, comments? I swear on my life if you all just say "bad idea," I'm just going to delete your response. Lets be open-minded here, folks.

So -- volunteers? Anyone need a further explanation?

THOR, you are aware that there is a "Send PM to new user" function right?
We should just write up something that explains all this crap and have the PM sent to all new users.
Done and done.

Whatever, if its automated, thats fine, too. I'm just thinking that someone is going to actually listen to a message from an actual user and ignore something from a bot.

The point of this is not just to tell people what to do, but to encourage their interaction with the community.

What happens when one user pms someone, then another user pms the same person?

Make the form sheet thing/pre-typed welcome and I'll pm each lil nooblet that comes in.

We have to figure out a way to coordinate who welcomes who, I suppose.

If you want to do it all on your own, that is your prerogative

It really isn't that hard...new members are slow to come in...plus I really have nothin else to do.

Having a person do it won't work well. As far as I can remember this has never been solved, when auto-prune goes down in the Mod and Scene discussion sections it will help, that and moving anything from general to them.

I nominate myself for this. I like helping out newbs. No matter how stupid the questions they ask are.

It makes me feel smarter than them.

Has used a phpBB 2.0 administration panel when?

I don't recall that being a default feature, and Wizard only uses phpBB mods from the official site.