Oh! It only took me several months to realise this was why I couldn't post!

Given that I've chatted on the irc channel for a few months now, and even contributed to the bitcoin-qt project, it does feel a little odd to be considered a newbie, and I'm not entirely sure how 5 posts on a newbie channel indicates I'm any less a newbie, but I guess there needs to be some way to reduce troll traffic. I'm wondering if these restrictions just encourage "newbies" to post mundane messages like this one to the newbie channel.