Btw, noone is ever going to see this, are they? Bloody topics don't show up in the darn thingy to the right :] They should. These are great to get to know people or to have a chat with new people.
We tried that, and it resulted in all kinds of ranting and complaining that welcome posts were clogging up the latest forum topics. I fought the good fight for awhile, but what the membership wants, the membership gets (occasionally).
I still think they're a good thing, as well, but even when they were showing up in LTP, probably only 5% or less of those type of posts got any sort of response.