New Member Introductions: Where???

[Nifty]

Ok, I need some smart people feedback (ok I'll also take some feedback from a few of you that may not qualify)

On BYC we have a "New Member Introductions" section. It's a great place for brand new members to post a little about themselves and get welcomed into the community. What we've found in our experiments is that new members need a very clearly defined place to post an introduction and we need to direct them to a specific location in the welcome email. We can do this with any of the existing sections or with some changes.

We should have one very clearly named "New Member Introductions" section here. I was going to just create one, but I realized that we already have:

About Me & My Garden
Where am I? Where are You?
There's already a bit of overlap there, so adding yet another "about me" type of section would be even more confusing to new members.

I was thinking about converting one of those sections to ALSO include "new member introductions", but then I go back and forth about adding a "New member introductions" section.

What do y'all think?

1. Add a third section called "New Member Introductions"
2. Add "New Member Introductions" to one of the existing sections above
3. Any other ideas on moving, renaming, merging, etc. these social sections to make things better / easier?

I can't wait for your feedback and ideas!!!

 

[journey11]

It seems like most new members already gravitate to the Where am I, Where are You section. It is almost entirely introductions and otherwise doesn't get used much after that. I think that would be a good place for it.

The Me, My Garden, My Family (which looks like it just got renamed to About Me and My Garden?) is usually where people end up going to talk about what's going on in their lives otherwise, although I'm sure some of that might also qualify as random ramblings. Whether that was the intent when you set it up, that seems to be the way we've been using it up to this point.

 

[unclejoe]

I'll weigh in here.

This morning I received an email announcing the new format. I haven't been here since '09 and quite honestly I had forgotten about it. I followed the link and to my surprise, actually remembered my password. The first thing I did was look around for a "new members" section. Not finding one I ended up reintroducing myself in the google map thread. If there was a section for just intro's I believe folks would use it.

BTW. Nice new format you have.

 

[897tgigvib]

I'd kind of vote for Retooling up the where am I? where are you? section.

One part of it could be a "basic operations" or "how to use this forum" thread, and another thread could be for the brand new or long time missing members to introduce themselves.

 

[Nifty]

Ok, we've renamed "Where am I? Where are you?" to "Where am I? Where are you? New Member Introduction"

We still have a lot of new member intros in About Me & My Garden

Any ideas on the best way to make that more clear?

 

[Nifty]

BTW, we have a trophy if you post an introduction in that section. There may be some trophy weirdness because of the reassignment.

 

[AMKuska]

Hey Nifty,

I think if you just add "New Member Intro" to the end, as you seem to have done, it will help make that clear. When I was looking for a place to add my intro it was a tough call between "Where are you" and "About me". Neither of them seemed to be about new members until you edited the name of the sub forum.