We use an auto-ticketing system that has that feature. They say, "halp i can't log in!! ur site is broke!!!" and see a page that says:
"Do any of these articles answer your question? If not, click the 'Submit my ticket' button below." One of the articles is titled "Can't log in? Try these steps..."
I assume that's catching some of them, but plenty still click the submit button. You will always have some people who navigate through every automated trap you set up. You can choose to ignore if you want, but your customer service reputation will suffer.
> Would it make sense to have an automated email to the effect of "Thanks for contacting us. Here are the frequently faced problems." ?
It depends on the target audience. If it consists of geeks/people familiar with computers from an early age, then, yes, they might read that, otherwise you're going to do what MicahWedemeyer does (and what myself I'm doing, for a Groupon-clone website targeted to women): emailing your users predefined passwords, hoping they'll actually change them after the first time they use them.
I'm not selling diamonds, only spa-coupons, so it's not the end of the world is someone-else somehow cracks other user's account (we don't store or process CC information on our side).
> you should immediately route them into a password-change workflow on login
We already have that by default (we're using Drupal), but, as I said, most of our target audience finds it too complicated.
