OP could then go into his "Post Filtering" settings and under "Marketplace -> Lending" could enter an expression like: exclude($memberRank < 2) (where 0 == "Brand New", 1 == "Newbie", 2 == "Jr. Member", etc).
I've seen similar suggestions before. Why not make use of the self-moderation feature? It could even be maintained by a user bot.
While that is a cool idea (using a bot to enforce local rules in a self-moderated thread), it's got nothing to do with what I suggested.
You're talking about individual threads, and I'm talking about whole boards. You're talking about deleting posts, and I'm talking about hiding them.
What I'm saying is that people have their own ideas about OP's suggestion (whether and how it should be implemented), and a consensus is unlikely to be reached, so why not think about the problem in a decentralized way?
If people could define personalized "board rules" that hid posts (on a given board) according to some criteria (probably given by entering an expression in some simple programming language), then we wouldn't have to agree on anything and we could all just set things up how we like them:
(*) DireWolfM14 would set his "Marketplace -> Lending" expression (somewhere in settings) to:
exclude($memberRank < 2), because that's how he wants it to work (doesn't want to see posts from newbies on the lending board).
(*) Timelord2067 would set his to:
exclude($memberRank < 3), because that's how he wants it to work (even more restrictive, only wants to see posts from "Members" and above on the lending board).
(*) Someone might decide that they don't want to see posts on the lending board from anyone with less than 100 merits, and they would set their expression to:
exclude($memberEarnedMerits < 100).
(*) People that don't care would leave their expression box empty (and nothing would change for them). Alternatively, the forum might pre-populate it with:
exclude($memberRank < 2) as a kind of "soft" policy (i.e. one that you
can override, but only by going into your settings and deleting the expression).
Now, obviously none of this prevents newbies from posting on the lending board in the first place (which is probably a good thing considering theymos' stance on restricting freedoms) but it does solve the problem of lenders ever having to deal with any of those posts, or even
see them (if they make use of this feature, that is).
It's also general-purpose and (I believe) would find uses on other boards. I know it seems like a seriously complicated thing to pull off (and it kind of is, I guess) but it's essentially just a very beefed-up version of my existing
member filtering patch (i.e. you can think of that patch as being a special case of what I've been outlining here: whenever you click the diamond "on" in that patch, it's basically the same thing as one of these hypothetical exclusion expressions being in effect).
(I'm not suggesting that myself or anyone else should be working on this, it's a pretty heavy lift with lots of cross-cutting concerns, performance considerations and thorny problems to work through; it would take a few months to implement properly. All I'm doing in this post is clearing up confusion and explaining what I meant in my previous post.)