Good idea. I should add some kind of welcome page.

How about "Don't say anything you wouldn't say to someone's face" next to the submit button for the comment box? It could be a link to the full guidelines page maybe.

Even for older users it could be good to have a little reminder to not be an arsehole (I could certainly use that sort of reminder on occasion).

Didn't someone write some kind of code to detect when a given text might be a flame? Not sure what it was based on. It'd be cool if the site said "your message looks kind of flame-y. Are you sure you want to post it?"

There is some available real estate in the navigation header. Maybe a "posting guidelines" link up there is warranted?

If it clutters the interface, it could go away once you get 100 karma or so.

I like tying it to karma rather than user date length. That way, long-time users that haven't done anything will still see the guidelines, as a sort of hint.

Why would long-time users that "haven't done anything" need the hint?

One may still benefit greatly from the experience of posting and commenting rather than observing. I was reading hn a while before I got an account, and never really thought about karma, submission titling or type, or comment voting.

I have often wondered why the posting, submission, and voting guidelines haven't been more prominent. I appreciate Paul's active role in this community--I think it account's for much of the civility to have benevolent moderators--but definitely making the principles easier to access would be helpful, too.

Incidentally, having the page detailing the post-formatting capabilities on the Reply page would be handy, so people are aware of italics,

  code indentation

and so on.

Yes, please. It took me a while to figure out how to indent code.

FYI, text surrounded by asterisks (*) will be intended. Begin a new line with two spaces, and you have code indentation.

An alternative to placing site guidelines on a welcome page or in the navigation header (where I believe they would eventually be glossed over) would be to link to the guidelines from within inappropriate comments. If a comment gets downmodded below a certain level, it could either be appended with a link to the site guidelines or altogether replaced by a link to the guidelines. This would probably be a better hint to the commenter that something he/she said may have violated the guidelines. This may also have the side effect of keeping people from abusing the downmod option.

This could be one approach to dealing with the "broken windows" issue: https://qht.co/item?id=373356

I guess a link saying Rules in the top Orange Bar would be nice. I think that's the most visible part of the HN site.

Displaying the policy before a low karma user can reply would be nice.

If you find yourself in that section of code, the little "help" link that shows after the edit box when "edit"ing could also be displayed when you are starting a reply.

I just added one (http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html). For the first day, new users get a link to it in the top bar and just above the "submit" button on the comment form.