CAPTCHAs as well as the manual approval should automatically go away at 3 posts. This was in direct response to spammers who weren't bots but just pay per post human operations, which pretty much defeats any sort of CAPTCHA (also BR?
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The other restrictions (no avatars, no PM, no access to certain forums) is more historical and has more to do with encouraging participation. All avatars are hosted serverside. So to not waste space on a bunch of one post wonders it's assumed that most likely if you make the 10 posts to earn them, you're not likely to just up and leave shortly after. Same with PMing, you can always reply to someone PMing you, but sending PMs unsolicited is blocked for privacy and spam control. Access to certain forums like the offtopic forum, Shrinemaiden Cafe, and the blog thread area LettyJournal, is to protect the privacy from people looking to just snoop without participating. Same with viewing the profile details of other members. We take user privacy rather seriously here, and postcount limits are an effective means to determine how "invested" you are in the community here.
Also, as a note, posts in this particular subforum are ALWAYS moderated for approval. This is supposed to be a forum where you can address questions to the staff, and by requiring posts to be approved, it allows you to safely ask a question of the staff privately (only staff members and janitors can see unapproved posts). If we deem it's something that is useful to publicly address, such as this thread, we can go ahead and approve it.
