I’m curious to see how well an “Introduce yourself” topic works. I might have been inclined to make a category or subcategory – but I see recommendations to just make it an ongoing topic.
I’d love to see some examples of “Introduce yourself” topic threads in the wild.
It varies massively and is very dependent on the type of community and the existing ethos.
That said, as with a lot of community initiatives: just try it 
The best way that I’ve seen them work is if the community manager actively invites people into the community to introduce themselves. This is one of those repetitive tasks that you shouldn’t automate, give it some flair, hook into someone’s name or bio or whatever. If it’s holiday season make it a rhyme etc.
They can be a great tool to get people to participate and step out of the lurker or one-time-participant vibe.
They can also fizzle and not work at all, which you’ll know after a few tries.
Thanks Bas – I’m gearing up to give it a try. I just wonder how it looks when there’s a single-topic “megathread” of intros – as opposed to creating a category for separate introduction topics.
With a single topic, I’m imagining replies & tangents related to older intros getting inlined with new introductions and just getting a bit messy. But… maybe that’s not typically an issue. I’ve never come across one, so hoping to at least see a couple.
Start with a simple topic first, if it becomes so successful that you should’ve used a category instead.. that’s a good problem to have 
Remember: we community managers always use too many categories.. always
We have used an “introduce Yourself’ category for years. We get about 1 introduction for about every 10 new members. You can check it out at Introduce Yourself Here.
We manually review every new members posts and it is a great way to handle questionable first post. When we get a questionable first post, we request an intro post.
+1
On my forum(s) I have a dedicated category for newcomers to introduce themselves, like this one:
Trust level 0 users see a banner on the homepage that prompts them to post in this category, though it is not mandatory.
A lot of forums make an introduction step mandatory, and personally, I don’t really like it.
I usually don’t like to introduce myself, and I won’t force “my” users to do so.
When creating a topic in this category, the template has 3 basic questions that users can start from.
Also, and I think it is an important part of this category, these topics are automatically closed after 1 month, else they sometimes drift into endless updates about some journey or infinite discussions, and there are more proper categories for this.
A good example of this phenomenon would be this introduction which quickly gained 80 replies in one month:
I didn’t try a single topic for all introductions, as I find introducing ourselves in this context a bit meaningless, and less regular users are prone to welcoming newcomers in this kind of topic. At least I’m confident it would be like this in my communities. It’s also based on what I’ve seen here and there on other forums.
Nice job. I love it.
Currently, i use a automation to send a mp (and email) inviting tl 0 users to introduce themselves in a dedicated topic. But its not working. I will change my strategy