I'm a n00b to this forum, but I can see why you guys want to make it harder to spam. It's kind of a pain in the ass for me to use this site as as newbie, though; I'm still restricted to a post every 360 seconds. Curses!
Yeah, I really think a 'post per time' limit like that is annoying, and probably not even helpful: in the speculation subforum, a number of aggressively dumb spammers manage to cause quite a lot of damage despite that limit (or maybe they're not newbies anymore).
I would really like the idea of a simplified 'approval' system: Newbies are at first restricted to post in a 'newbie' board, asking questions about the protocol, etc. and in general, showing that they can adhere to good form. Any user who is a member for 1 year or longer can go there and 'approve' a newly registered account .... by which I don't mean you should only be approved based on merit or super-smart posts, that would be too elitist/restrictive, but more on the *absence of total idiocy*.
A bit like how some of the Wikipedia projects have 'sighted' versions of articles: anyone can edit, but it takes an established account to confirm that an edit wasn't spam/trolling, and mark the article as 'sighted'. It's a really low-level form of approval, doesn't require much other than that you are *not* an idiot
