That's advice that can apply in any community. There's nothing nice for a new member than to receive some friendly welcomes. (A batch of welcomes certainly beats a bunch of flames!)

i try to offer a welcome to newbies even if i don't have a good response to the particular question posted...

That's a good way to bump an orphan post, too.

What would be very nifty is an auto-welcome link. Something like [welcome] perhaps :)

That would save me some copy-and-pasting anyhow ;)

Yeah, but an auto-welcome isn't any more warm or personal than what you get at the front door of Wal-Mart.

Jim

I think you misunderstood. I meant a code (e.g. [welcome] that would create a link saying welcome to webmasterworld [webmasterworld.com].

At the moment I keep fiddling around looking for the URL. It occurred to me that there might be more welcomes if this step was easier.

You can put some custom code in your profile that would let you copy your welcome message in quickly. Not quite as easy as a tag, though.

(Still, I can probably type "Welcome to wmw" faster than I can hunt around for special brackets...)

While an automated welcome to a forum will never take the place of a personal one, I wouldn't discount the possibilities of well-written automated messages. On one forum, I get about one email a day saying "thanks" for an automated birthday greeting. Occasionally these are quite effusive. In one case, the member said we were the only ones who remembered!