Note that this does not affect:
- PM rate-limiting, which is based purely on activity & whitelisted status.
- "You must wait ___ seconds...", which is based purely on activity & whitelisted status.
But it does affect:
- Voting in polls
- Patroller jurisdiction
- The "ignore newbie PMs" option.
- "The body is omitted from this email because the sender is a newbie."
- BBCode limits
- Reduced-accuracy link filtering
- Board restrictions
Many of these limitations can be eliminated with a copper membership. In particular, you can set a signature at Member level if you wear a copper membership.
One reason that I was hesitant to do this before is that there are an awful lot of newbie restrictions, and I don't want the forum to be unwelcoming to good newbies. I'll think about tying some of those to activity instead of rank in the future.
With help from DdmrDdmr, I just added 36 new merit sources, which should help newbies achieve the requirement. But if you're incapable of posting anything worthwhile, then you will never rank up, and you shouldn't: this isn't the forum for you.
