Due to excessive garbage-posting, you now need 1 merit to be a Jr Member. All existing Jr Members who didn't meet the requirement were demoted.
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.
Sometimes, it becomes obvious that some persons don't just want to grow up. The new rule notwithstanding, those good ones will still prove their mettle. It will not stop both the good and the
bad from joining, but certainly, it was a deserving rule. What needed to be done has been done.
I like very much how theymos cares about good users and new users. In other occasions I've appreciated how he has shown deep empathy and concern for "poor" users - those who live in poor countries and taking part to Bitcointalk (and bounty campaigns) helps them to survive and to feed families. In short, I've realized what a nice person theymos likely is.
This being said, introducing 1 Merit requirement to become Junior Member was absolutely necessary for trying to protect the forum. The garbage posting by Newbies and Juniors has recently reached unprecedented levels - some of them probably even use bots to create entire discussions which are close to meaningless. When I'll have more time I'm planning to start to report then all whenever I stumble in them.