Right off the bat, I think we need to tell people how to find and/or request lyrics. That seems to be what draws most newcomers to Mudcat. The problems that newcomers have are these:

Newcomers don't know how to search for lyrics, so they just start a thread by asking for lyrics instead, even when they could be easily found. Some Mudcatters are always willing to help them, which is fine, but some others give sarcastic answers, which no doubt alienates some newcomers. Mainly, it clutters up our archive with multiple threads about the same song.

Once they have started a thread, they don't know how to find it again, especially if it has disappeared beyond the 24-hour "event horizon." So sometimes they just start yet another thread asking the same question. Or they just fail to show up again to clarify their requests or to thank the people who have tried to help them. I have seen some Mudcatters grouse about the fact that requesters fail to thank them, but I don't think it's a matter of rudeness so much as ignorance. Probably the reason they never thanked you for your reply is because they never saw your reply—because they don't know how to find it. I have also seen newcomers start a second thread to thank people who responded to their first thread! (I think this happened when the newcomer got his reply by email.)

Newcomers often don't seem to know that our custom is to post replies in the same thread as the question, so they ask us to email them instead. This leads me to suspect that many newcomers have never participated in any kind of online forum before, so they don't even know what a "thread" is, or how one message becomes connected to another. Probably the only experience they have ever had in communicating by computer is by email. So when they type a message into a message box, they probably think they are sending email to some anonymous website manager. Naturally they expect to receive a reply by email as well. So I think somewhere you've got to explain to people what a forum is, and how it is different from email.

Surely we aren't the only website to have this problem. How do other forums handle it? Let's not reinvent the wheel. Maybe somebody out there has already written some good basic generic information about what a forum is, and how to use one. Maybe we could copy it or link to it.

It occurs to me that, since the forum page already looks different to members than to non-members, you could put LOTS of helpful hints on the non-member version of the forum page, without creating a nuisance for long-standing members. And maybe you could do the same thing with other pages as well.