I understand the concern. We have been wondering within the project about this issue. The thing is that users who don't get nominated feel like they did something wrong, and the reason we only nominate verified intro posts has been to remove the need for users to fake/identity theft on the platform.

To not leave the legitimate new members in the dust just cause they didn't verify their account, we felt a message from our personal accounts letting them know about the project and the support it could give as long as you verify in some way that you really are a new/legitimate user to the platform. I understand that copy-pasting a comment can be seen as spam, but most newcomers have appreciated the information and provided verification later.

We could consider writing these messages manually instead? The whole reason we aren't posting these with the @projectnewbie account was to only comment with it on qualifying ones thus making the amount of weekly new legitimate users easier to count from that account.