In mobile view, a third of the screen is taken up with the header and top menu, another third is taken up with the orange panel and the bottom third is taken up by “welcome to our community site”. Only after scrolling down do you get to any actual content. It takes a lot of scrolling to get to any actual content. But initially, that mobile user sees very little of what I see at first glance on a desktop screen. So, that “top left corner” of the desktop screen needs to contain something very compelling when it appears on its own to encourage people to scroll down further.
I’ve tried to fix that by removing the righthand top menu panel (it was to the right of the Updates panel, and appeared below it on mobile devices). Removing the menu would help further.
Perhaps the home page needs a completely different layout to the rest of the site. A landing page dominated by a photo and story that changes every day from a list of top articles. So the site looks different at every visit, even if, at first, nobody is contributing anything new.
The “Welcome” post absolutely must be the first post you see on the main page. If I don’t describe the content and display an age warning, I’ll get in trouble (with my hosting company for starters).
Is there a mechanism that could automatically embed a random blog or forum post on the home page?
Not that I know of. There may be a plugin that does that but I’m attempting to remove around 1/3 of the plugins as I’ve got way too many.