The sudden change to have members with a low post count was brought in to enable moderators to control the spam before it gets a chance to spread throughout the entire forum. The "btkoin/bitswing" spammers used to plaster the other forums on a regular basis - as you said, you stuck mostly to the one thread so perhaps weren't exposed to the full extent of the spam, but it was making discussion in the other forums impossible as threads were being knocked back a number of pages every time it happened. Regarding old users opening new accounts, all new accounts must be treated equally. You can still view any thread on the forum without first reaching 50 posts, and actually hitting that limit can be done in less than an hour or two when contributing to legitimate discussion in the Newbie forum. The only possible exceptions to the rule are when a vendor registers an account and needs to be able to post elsewhere in order to advertise their products, but even then that very rarely occurs. By the time an admin even gets the chance to view the request made by a moderator the member in question will usually already have 50+ posts. Libertas