It is easy to manually make the accounts and then put the bots to post.
Having captchas for posting would block that.
It is true it would be annoyance for legit newbies, but spam bots posting is annoyance for all legit users, not just newbies.
Very true and lets be honest, 99.9% of new accounts are either scammers, spammers, trolls, alts or account farmers. Or in other words of absolutely no value to this forum whatsoever. The forum would be a cleaner better place without them.
Yes it would be a slight inconvenience for the rare genuine new account but they pale into insignificance when compared to the number of crap accounts being created every day.
I see many new accounts with legit question or who are looking for support. Some are already annoyed by the post limit. Pestering them further with a captcha on top of that might drive them away. Id like to think that you get pretty good support here.
I understand genuine new accounts would be annoyed by a captcha and / or post restrictions, but hey, tough shit, they'll get over it and understand if they're genuine. And whats more they'll understand if its cleaning up the forum. As already mentioned most new accounts are not real / genuine people. And how many posts does a brand new account have to make? If you're here to learn you read, read and read some more. Then if you feel confident enough you ask a question. In my experience that was hours or even days after joining a new forum. Most of these new accounts are posting within minutes with junk or basic questions that have already been answered a million times before, this is not the normal behavior of someone that's just joined a forum. It's of someone that's done it before and has ulterior motives.
I have signed up to many forums in the last 20 / 25 years with my other interests including football, cars, work related etc. and sometimes had to wait hours for my first posts to be approved and on some for the first replies to approved as well. This didn't bother me in the slightest because I was genuine and wanted to learn something. I also understood it eliminated the crap 100%.
Lets not forget this is by far the biggest bitcoin forum and the one everyone wants to join. Making it difficult for the trash will clean up the forum and give the genuine users a better experience. Also, being bitcoin related it attracts all the scum in cyber world like flies round shit.
I say lets get tough on new account sign ups because all the crap is driving genuine people away.