This is a shell post for various comments which I'm using as the source-of-truth for some moderation messaging (currently, what a new user sees when they go to make their first post or comment).
It seemed good to make it public so people could comment on it if they wanted. I'm particularly unsure about how to handle things like "not being familiar with background material." I think it's easy to overdo and make it feel very burdensome, but also man it sure is annoying having a bunch of people showing up missing a lot of context.
(You can comment on this post, the two initial comments are just used as the text-source for some places in our codebase)
A bad-thing-to-avoid is that the people who are most scrupulous about reading messages like this, who (maybe) are also more likely to have written fine posts in the first place, end up overly anxious about it and delaying longer unnecessarily.