[lyphe]

Scarecrow, I agree with you completely on being nicer to the newcomers as to not scare them away. Personally when I first found this forum I asked a question (which I’m sure would have been easily answered by the FAQs) and the first few responses I got were excessively aggressive and negative. *points at Greylocks* I now understand the responses I got, but back then I was ready to walk away and look for another forum to answer my question, after all, just because I’m had no knowledge about airsoft, didn't make those who responded any better then me. In fact I had no idea there was even a sport surrounding airsoft until a few days after I joined. Now what I’m trying to relay here is that not everyone would stay and wait for the nice reply (respect goes out to Brian for being a good mentor). I think that we are scaring off a lot of potential future players by being impatient with all the noobs and their 'stupidity'.

The solution? The first thing to do is NOT waste your time flaming people as someone just mentioned, ignore the post if you must, just don't flame. With a little work, I think that a Mudroom would work very well for keeping ignorant posts out of the general public's way. All we need is for a decent amount of members to go to the section and answer the simple questions and point newbies in the right direction. Most of the newbie questions are essentially the same, so its not like we need someone ultra airsoft-savvy to be tending to them, with the immense amount of members here, I’m sure that a separate section for newbie posts can be easily managed.