Introducing newbies to the internet msg boards

How to explain the concept to the uninitiated.

[Reflection]

On a site that has a lot of users who are fairly new to the internet, and thus new to forums, how do you go about #1 introducing them to the concept of forums, #2 getting them to make their first post.

Many people who are 'newbies' seem to be afraid of message boards and are intimidated by all the options available 'on the screen'. To someone familiar with message boards, most everything is pretty straight forward. So how do you explain something that seems 'obvious' (ie click 'new post' to start a new post etc.) to those who just don't get it?

Sending them to the "FAQ" of your board software doesn't really help as most of the FAQ's tend to be geared towards those who are somewhat familiar with message boards.

Any suggestions?

[TheDoctor]

This was a question I faced with my message board when I set it up. I solved the problem by

• During the pilot stage, getting a few potential users to try the board out. To start with I gave no clues, provided no help or faq page.
  
• Got the responses, worked out where the difficulties and misundertandings were and wrote a help page that addressed all the problems in a simple accessible fashion.
  

I have since been congratulated on how good my help page is by other forum owners running the same forum software as me. More importantly, Even naive users seem to get the message, so the approach must have some merit.

[rogerd]

I'm in favor of simplification - some forums have a huge amount of stuff displayed by default. Turn off options, or hack the templates if you have to - but keep what's on the screen to the bare minimum needed to read and create posts. As your user base grows in sophistication, you might add a few features back in. Even for experienced users, though, a simple interface with the emphasis on content will be a good thing.