No offense taken Slj, airing opinions is always worth while.
The problem however is there are some fairly serious counter points.
The first is you state that "members cannot post in introductions topic or know where to post"
The problem is that over 400 posts in the introductions topic, with new members coming nearly every day shows there are new members who are making it to the forum.
if there is some sort of technical issue with the posting we do need to know about it, and people are welcome to email, if however people are simply not able to post in the introductions topic due to lack of computer skills there isn't a lot we can do.
I'll gladly write up help documents etc and give what assistance I can, but at rock bottom this is a web forum, and if one doesn't have the minimal internet skills to fill in form with edit fields like the submission form, and reply to a topic like the introductions topic there isn't much we can do.
finally I'm afraid there is yes, the matter of spam.
Myself and the other moderators all give our time free, nobody pays us. the few weeks before the system was put in place we were having spambots post which were truly destructive, posting hundreds of posts to many topics, all of which needed to be tracked down and cleaned out by myself and the other staff, often having to be deleted one by one to preserve people's actual posts.
Nobody wants a captcha system on this forum, besides how affective capcha systems actually are is debatable anyway.
the introductions idea is a sort of halfway house. It does not require members to do anything unusual like decipher some impossible to hear numbers guess at a password, neither is it intrusive, popping up every five minutes since once a member's account is approved it will stay that way.
However, it does! prevent spambot registration in a very real, very applicable way, and hell, its not as if we're asking members to do anything out of the ordinary by introducing themselves first off on the forum anyhow (my own first ever post on the forum was in the introductions thread).
So, unless there is a technical reason why people are having trouble registering, I'm not really sure there is anything we can do about the problem.
I do agree that either a link to the site faq should be posted in a more readily visible place, or a note about posting in the introductions topic should be added to the rules, but other than those things I'm afraid I'm not sure what else can be done.
Hope this makes sense.
With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)