Well, the whole purpose behind the time as member and post count things is to stop and/or deter spammers from using your forums as a place to peddle their garbage, or build up their page rank on Google and other search engines. I had that issue over at my old tech site for years. It's why I turned off signatures for anyone with less than 10 posts and had a rather aggressive spam filter as well. It sucks for the new members who are honest, but it sure beats the alternative.
Of course, if the search engines were smart, they'd start setting up honeypot forums all over the place, and any links that were posted in them would automatically get blacklisted on the search engines. That'd kill about 90% of the spammers dead in the water right away.
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