For your convenience.

Welcome to bitcointalk.org!  This thread goes over the basics of bitcoin, so I would suggest checking it out.  Look below for more info about the forums.

Newbie Restrictions
You can only post in the Newbie and Local sub-forums till you have made one post and waited 4 hours. This post must be substantial: at least several sentences. The other two restrictions are you need 1 post to be able to send a PM and 10 posts to put a link in your sig.  You can only post once every 360 seconds to start and there are a few other things that trigger this timer such as logging in and searching.

See the old newbie restrictions thread or the whitelist request thread.