I usually welcome new member if they make a particularly interesting/funny first post. I read them all but I find it hard to break the habits from other forums where a post of just "Welcome." or something would be seen as spam or something to get your post count up.
In response to the original post though, yeah.. I went out for most of yesterday and was too tired to log on when I got home so when I logged on this morning there were about 4 pages of new posts. :S

Any chance of getting the bar that separated new posts from old posts with unviewed threads back?