Here's an idea... is there a way to notify mods if a new member has posted something that has received no responses whatsoever? It seems that pretty much every post in the Introduction thread gets responses, and I think that made a difference to me when I joined, but I just noticed a post in a different thread that was around three weeks old and had no responses at all, and it was the only post from the member. Getting no responses at all can be quite discouraging..... In reality I can be a cynical and ruthless person, but I DO want everyone do to feel encouraged to participate and do their best!
Unfortunately, there isn't. We just kinda have to keep an eye out. Unfortunately, we sometimes miss things, though, and it's actually why we set up the whole Mentor thing, just to make sure people weren't being overlooked.
With the nature of this forum, though, and the way we tend to stay in one thread all the time, it can be easy to overlook stuff that gets posted in other parts of the forum. Personally, I have the majority of the forums on this site set to notify me when new threads are made, just so I can make sure people are getting their questions answered. I don't always seem to get the notifications, though, especially in this particular forum, and I'm not sure why.
But it's not really something that should be totally on the staff anyway, IMO. This community really depends on its members to help out other members. We only have a handful of people on staff, and we don't always have all of the answers, so I think it's really important that other members keep an eye on these less-used forums, too. We try to pick up the slack where we can, but obviously the few of us don't possess the entire knowledge of the collective community. This is really one of those things where we need everyone chipping in.
May I ask which thread that you saw this person that wasn't being answered? Maybe I don't currently have notifications set for there, so I'm curious.
@aveline is right, we've been accused of profiting on the forum. On the other hand if we are accused of that w/out having raffles, I don't see what the problem is with adding raffles and still getting accused of it. 
