Honestly, anyone who has ever been to a forum knows this is just tacky, classless and distracting. If you want to have a welcome wagon then, by all means, message new contributors. In fact, many people do/have and I think this is a great way. However, not everyone wants to be involved in the forums and it's pretty silly to post to messages when these people may never see them.

Furthermore, as an established contributor, it really makes it difficult to browse the forums when there are so many of these useless threads hanging around. Maybe it wouldn't be such an eyesore if it was all contained to 1 thread a week or something--or to a forum which I had the option to exclude from the index. As it stands, it is making EF look like it just stepped out from 1995.

Oh, shit. See, there's already 2 topics about this that I didn't catch because of all this spam.