some mechanism to actually let maintainer know that a new user has joined

I was hoping that simply mentioning the maintainer in the bot message might have this effect, but not so.

If the user follows the instruction to flag the maintainer in any question it should be fine, but some people don't understand that part of flag - I'm looking to ensure that any question from a new person joining the channel gets noticed, but I get I'm pushing too hard on a corner case ...