What I've found works the best for me (not the best for everyone) is that I have a "tutorial maze" where to get to the next part you have to answer a question correctly or else you get teleported back and have to answer again. On the sides of the hallway/room are signs that have text explaining rules and how some things work on my server. The having to answer correctly part causes many people to read since they can guess but sometimes they will get teleported back to the very start. Then at the end of the maze you have the last question be something like "where do you go to apply to be graylisted so you can build" or something like that, once I added that last part with a link to the site it increased the amount of people who actually did it.
People still do read, just not the people I would want on my server.