last week (in response to complaint by new member that it was unclear) I added to the registration page that people had to come in here and do the intro post - and then a couple of days ago I logged in with a test account and saw that the intro section wasn't the only forum that appeared to a new member with zero posts... there were a few odd stragglers in there like the Autoboard 5 and one other section still showing - so I fixed that - now after people register all they can see of the forums is the intro section, and once they make their intro posts the forums reappear
so hopefully we'll stop getting people signing up and then not knowing why the forum disappeared