With reason I haven't followed this "experiment" development as it has evolved, but I'm here now with some spare time, and having read all the pertinent posts, I'd like to offer up my own response as well.

There's not much surprise to anything Marduk has posted (and thereby not much to take offense to). My ComPanel gets buried behind windows, word processors, Photoshop, etc. On a busy day I can go hours without seeing it, let alone know who's even online. Sure it causes neglect, but its a result of a larger issue that I'd rather not get into here and now. If I'm distracted and miss a newbie, well then it happened. Hopefully there was another scribe online who did catch them. Whenever I'm not too busy and I do see the Daylings, I gram them. Hey - I'd love it if we scribes received notifications in gram form each and every time a newbie was online. But we don't. I'd rather have Daylings at the top of the ComPanel so that I'd never miss them, but that's not practical. Yeah, I volunteered for this work, and welcoming newcomers is certainly part of it, but to be honest, the Scribes have to pick and choose what they can do with their time, and not everything fits at once. Rub you the wrong way? Yeah, it does me too. Unfortunate. But it's nothing I need an experiment to alert me of.

There's not much denying the value of Welcoming Committees, so I'm not going to (simply said, I love you guys), but I caution suggestions that we need worry about over-gramming newcomers. I am glad that Marduk didn't receive the 11 grams that he was, I guess, hoping for (to be honest, the two he did recieve are, to me, sufficient), but that's just the thing, he didn't receive them. I don't feel we need to worry about over-gramming newbies when it's presently a concern that we're not gramming them enough. At this time, it seems a bit much to ask that I only gram Daylings from my own world; if I see a newbie, I'm more than happy to raddle off a gram to them, my world or not. The messages are short, sweet, and non-compulsory, the newbie need only do three things a) reply with question, b) reply with thank you, c) not reply. I don't see the welcome grams as overwhelming, but yes, that's reliant on the fact that I know not a lot of them are being sent.

Did I offer any thoughts of merit this whole time? No? Fannnnntastic, at least I stayed up late to write it.