Hi MrTWS
Thanks for your thoughts on this. I understand your concern relating to wasted space, however as I have just launched the forum this week I am more concerned about ensuring that new members feel comfortable in participating in the site, and having existing members welcome them is a great way of letting them feel more comfortable.
The welcome idea you mentioned is a great idea - in fact that's what I have done, in my post above I mention creating a post, not a PM
I do have a generic welcome as a sticky in the welcome forum, however the intention is to prompt existing members to say Gday to new members so they don't feel like an outsider - It can be daunting for a lot of people joining a new forum as they see many other people that obviously know each other so they have a tendency to be a passive member - In order for my forum to succeed I need to encourage members to share, and I believe this is a reltively simple yet effective way of doing this (I have allready seen promissing results since doing this manually)
I do not intend to use PM's for this - What I wish to do is to programatically add a new post in the welcome forum that I have created. Currently myself or other members are adding a new post for each new member and others replying to that post - what I wish to do is automate that first post and the members will take it from there.
I look forwards to having sufficient numbers of members on the forum that I need to start being concerned about storage space! Using the posts as I intend to I can easily prune that forum at a later stage if required.
Oh well, I guess nobody else has done this one for WWF, so I'd better make some time to do it as this is an important part of my strategy for getting new members to feel comfortable enough to participate rather than just lurk.
Cheers
Tony