Theymos decided not to have any more restrictions on newbie accounts as it would look “much harsher” to the new members.
Allow me to quote myself quoting theymos on this:
It's very unlikely theymos wants to further restrict Newbies:
The things on the forum which encourage spam are allowed mainly because it's part of the forum's mission to be as free as possible.
~snip~
Limiting newbie participation is very harmful for a community. Newbie jail will never return: I consider the newbie-jail period to have been extremely damaging to the forum. When barriers to participation are too high, then the best people often just won't go to the trouble of joining, and the people who are willing to jump through the hoops are often people who aren't good for the community: people with nothing better to do, scammers, get-rick-quickers, etc. Having a permanent newbie jail policy would improve things a lot in the short-term, but would end up being a fatal poison to the community.
To show an example of restricting the wrong people from participating, see my
whitelist topic: users like
Synchronice,
n0nce and
PowerGlove were all blocked by a proxyban. More restrictions would mean we end up with even less new real users.