I'm going to disagree. I think that any person legitimately looking for information on otherkin/therians/alterhumans in general is almost certainly going to check the drop-down menu before making an account and immediately requesting information and interviews with members. I think that, when someone is claiming to be curious (and seeking to make some sort of documentary/work of media/paper on us) jumping right into asking individuals for interviews instead of reading through the many public resources available is a bit of a red flag. Even if somebody is here in good faith, when told "hey, we have a process here for this, you should take a look at it", they should be able to go "oh, my bad, let me do that".
In my experience (both on Kinmunity- that recent thread- and elsewhere), the people who don't read the site thoroughly enough tend not to act like that. They think they should be exempt to the policy, that what they're doing is so little and so harmless that it doesn't matter. People shouldn't be offended being told that there are certain rules for media/academic requests, and I don't think we should accommodate those people.
That being said, I think what I dislike most is the idea of a "banner". I would be in favor of adding a little section about the media and academic request process to the guidelines that people are supposed to read before joining. It might even be a decent idea to add the links to the "Resources" section of the navigation bar in addition to the "Info" section, just to catch those few people who maybe forget to look under "Info" for some reason or another. But I don't think it should be too visible- I don't think it should look like Kinmunity is actually advocating or asking for those media requests.
I know that I would love to see a documentary that addressed otherkinity and therianthropy respectfully and accurately. I would love to see a book with otherkin/therian characters that treats it fairly. But that's not what sells, and not what people are really trying to make. Look at what's on TV- stuff like Dr. Phil, Maury, reality TV in general (that's a very Americentric list, I know, but I'm not super sure what the rest of the world's equivalents are). People love looking at people who are weirder than them and laughing and being able to think "well at least I'm not that bad!". Otherkin would be excellent fodder for that- look at cringe compilations, which try to accomplish pretty much the same thing. That's why media requests are treated with such suspicion- that sort of thing is typically what people making media requests are after, not what we would actually like to see.
I realize that was a little dramatic, and didn't exactly address the point of why I don't think a "banner" would be a good idea, so I'll go back to that. From what I've seen, people who are making requests in good faith don't really have a problem finding the correct information. There was a researcher I spoke to last week (who had posted an academic request on a different website which I contacted her through) who seemed to have had no problem finding Kinmunity's academic request process.
I don't think making the academic/media request process more visibly to prevent accidental rule-breakers is necessary, because those accidental rule-breakers should be able to say "okay, sorry, let me do that" when they're pointed to the proper process. I think it's telling that, at least in my experience, most of them do not react that way. Making the academic/media process more visible may have the negative side effect of looking like the site actually encourages those things, which could potentially put off new members who are wary of those things. I just don't think it's necessary.
This post turned out far longer than I expected, and I apologize for that, so I'll just summarize the main points. I think most of the people who are here because they're actually interested in otherkin go through enough of the site that they rarely miss the academic/media pages. Even if they do miss it, they should be willing to go through the proper process when pointed to it. Maybe add a link to and mention of the academic/media requests in the site guidelines, just so if someone tries to skip it it's obvious that they didn't even read through the rules, but I think something highly visible like a banner could give off the wrong impression.
