Firstly, however hard you try personally, you cannot take responsibility for the whole of this community ... it's large, and at the moment there are hundreds of newcomers! It really is nice to know however that you care so passionately about this place and that you and others are putting so much of your time and energy into the community.

Sorry ... didn't realise you were after specific suggestions, your last post didn't make that clear to me! ... will see what I can come up with, and if I think of anything else then I know who to come and pester! ... *grins*

Ok ... RevdKathy and others have mentioned a lot of things in this thread that are being worked on ... all of them sound like they'd make it much easier for new members to integrate into the forum. In particular it would be much easier to contribute to different parts of the community if the multiple login system was sorted out.

Testing ... to me this sound like something that most newish members of the community could actually be able to help with, and could be encouraged to get involved with, especially since a lot of people haven't got the patience to wait for apps to reach extras ... I'm probably just not trying hard enough, but it would be nice if there was an easy testing process to provide the type of feedback to developers about the things that a newish user would be able to test ... I also think it would be good if it became the norm to explain testing (probably by pointing them to an easy to follow wiki) when people ask about using extras-testing, or it's suggested that they download an app from that repository.

It seems to me that there are an awful lot of threads getting moved around this forum, probably because the forum structure is confusing to a newcomer ... I think it would be nice to have a help forum where people could ask simple newbie type questions ... preferably somewhere near the top of the list of forums so that it's relatively easy to find, and if people don’t have the patience to answer those types of questions they’d just be able to avoid that part of the forum altogether.

"Smartness System" type threads, talk about "Elitism", and complaining about "a huge influx of new members with no obvious bent toward community or contribution" (yes, that was you!) don't help make newcomers feel welcome, and don't help them become more productive community members ... I really do understand that the original members of the community are seeing things change monumentally at the moment, but if the intention was for these to be light-hearted letting off steam type threads, then it really wasn't obvious to me ... (and I know that in the same post I quoted you also praised RevdKathy for the contribution that she has made and said you'd welcome more users like her - but the tone made it sound like you're judging us all waiting to see which category we fall into instead of encouraging people into the more helpful category.)

Hope this helps as a start. I’ve gained a lot from this forum and really want to be able to put back in some of what I’ve received.