I think the biggest difficulty here is that ... we can come up with all kinds of plans and methods and ideas about how to make new characters feel more welcome, but none of them are going to work without people following through. We've already got the OOC buddy system in the works, as well as people feeling more inspired to tag intro posts based on the statistics we posted.

Basically, I'd just like to state that all it takes is tagging one intro per character per month. Just one, out of however many posts you end up tagging per month. That alone would dramatically increase results and I think it would make people feel a hell of a lot more welcome here. I'm not sure there is any viable way to make people do this, but maybe, put this way, more people will be more willing to work it into what they've already got on their plates. I absolutely don't want people to feel unwelcome here. :(