Maybe create a subforum like the Road Racing forum and call it Newbies. That way, all traffic from newbies can be directed to that sub-forum, and some nice, kind, empathetic and knowledgable members can be mentors there.

Of course, it would require a lot of work by moderators to ensure new threads started by newbs in the main Road forum were moved.

It sort of means that we have primary school (newbs), secondary school (Road) and high school (Racing) and no-one feels like they are at risk of being bullied by some big bad senior.

Yeah, I know... crap idea.

But hey, if the thread had been closed earlier, we would have missed out on chipcom's truly classic repartee with the lifp... I haven't laughed so much here for a long, long time.