Forcing An "Introduce Yourself" Post For New Members?

[timk]

On my forum, I want to force people to introduce themselves by posting a thread in the "Introduce Yourself" section.

The way I want to do this is by them not being able to post in any other section until they have posted there.

One way of doing this would be for the usergroup they first get put in after registration to only have permissions for this forum and then after they have posted there I could manually change their usergroup.

Is there an easier way of doing this so it is all automated? Am I missing something in vBulletin which allows you to do this? Or is there a plugin to do it?

[Mark.B]

Yes...simply do as you've described, then set a promotion so that once they have posted they move to the main usergroup with full access.

Of course, this won't guarantee that they won't simply post a smiley or something, but it's about as close as you'll get until someone develops an artificial intelligence hack for vB

[Shelley_c]

The majority of people are put off by forced introductions so my advice is to force introductions for a while (untill there's several pages) of introductions and then disable the 1 post rule. There's no guarantee that members will carry on introducing themselves, but there's a higher chance they will if they see other members have introduced themselves.

[timk]

Thanks Mark.

And thanks Shelly - comment taken onboard. Maybe I'll just send a PM to newly registered users requesting that they do it rather than forcing it.