I don't know how keen theymos would be to implement this suggestion, but it would be nice if newbies weren't allowed to post in the lending board. Recently there's been a rash of trolling and spam in the lending board all because (at least one) newbies are refusing to accept reasonable advice or take "no" for an answer. I'm of the opinion that it's all due to one troll with multiple alts, but that's irrelevant.
+1 for this point, I was thinking of a small case, if the newbie is someone who is willing to lend to make a profit, even though its rate is very low. But if he already has money to lend to others, he can totally afford to put down a small amount of money to become a co-member. So, it is very reasonable to limit newbies in participating in the loan table 
But technically I'm not sure the admin is willing to do it, this forum wasn't originally designed to restrict users to any boards, this requires him to change the code a bit and maybe it's more complicated than we thought
