I'm a big fan of this tool since it has been deployed, but I don't think this gray box is really at all that useful. First, the message appears after someone has already pressed the button that says "Add topic", which is self-evident that that's the way in which you do exactly what the message in the gray box is saying. If you're there is because you already know how to add a topic, therefore the box is unnecessary. However, it would be useful to have a similar message when someone ends up in the Discussion page -- the same way that when you're a new user you get all those blue dots that point you at "this is how you cite", "this is how you add a category", etc. So, to me, it should be pointed out with those blue dots and with that pop-up message, not this message.
I'm also in favor of reducing the amount of instructions & boxes & text that people have to navigate through in the interface. As a suggestion, for example, the warning that appears with "Please provide a title", could be simplified by adding at as a sample text in the title box itself rather than a warning below the title box. "Description" in the text box might not be very indicative either of what you have to do there (granted, a description, but it could be more specific: "Please provide a description of the issues with this article").
Second, "ping to others"... does it make sense anymore? Ping is very much a computer term, I think that people tag people, they don't ping people anymore, so for the vast majority of the world this might not be a common term. I'd review that.
And last, I agree with the comment someone made about the need to make the license terms more explicit and not only the ToS. It doesn't add that much and the text is so small anyways that it doesn't bother visually.
I hope this is useful, feel free to ignore it if it is not. And thanks for pinging me! Appreciate it!
