[quote]One of the more silly ideas was to add a new counter just below the post count, something along the lines of "newcomers welcomed", so you can (publicly) keep track of how often you've discharged your Samaritan duties.[/quote]

Queue me spamming in the introduction threads to get that count up to stroke my e-penis even harder than the current post rating system does. 

Perhaps more seriously, this isn't a bad idea but I don't really feel like this would incentivize people. It'd be fun once, twice, maybe ten times, but then the novelty of the counter wears off and people will fall back to not welcoming people.

[quote]Another idea is to more officially appoint a squad of 'mentors' (call them what you like) whose task it is to extend a helping hand to new members, which they are free to accept or decline. Should a new user feel the need to have a veteran show them the ropes, a mentor would stand ready to provide such a crash course and to answer any questions. [/quote]

Queue people getting pissy for not being selected, queue people with the mentor rank going AWOL, etc. If you're running this community style there needs to be some sort of minimum activity level. Otherwise, it will probably end up like RPGN for example, where people do the job for a week or 3 and then end up not getting gratification out of it.

But it's not a bad idea. But then is the question, who are you going to recruit? Great roleplayers? Or friendly people, that might not be as good at roleplay? That'd depend on what you're looking to achieve - help them learn the ropes of roleplay, in which case there are plenty guides already, or help them feel welcomed, which in fairness probably doesn't need an entire rank of it's own just to do that. 

[quote]On an old forum I visited, I was very motivated by the leveling system they had. 10 points = Soldier, 50 points = General and so on. I was no longer the newbie with 5 posts. I was someone reaching the Soldier rank. So I talked and participated more. It helped develop my forum's persona instead of letting me waste away in silence. The cherry on top was that our ranks were colour coded and had picture associated with it - like those strips you see on the Navy's shoulders. The visual picture element meant that we could instantly see each other's ranks. It was a fun rank - nothing competitive.[/quote]

This is probably my favorite idea. A forum I went to did something similar (forums.taleworlds.com) where the ranks went from peasant to grand master knight. It was calculated by hours spent online instead of posts to prevent spam. So you'd have to have almost a year of daily usage of the forum in relatively reasonable doses to get grand master knight. It came with interesting images to represent that rank, and to me it felt like a real good initiative to get people to spend time there and be active. 

The grandmaster knights were also often respected members of the community and generally pretty nice people (until I became grandmaster knight, ofc). It gave me a pretty good reason to be active there, because I looked up to these guys and wanted a nice looking lance to go under my name. :lol 

But then this isn't really linked to welcoming new people, so I don't know if this is particularly helpful for the issue at hand.