Quote Originally Posted by Enkidoh View Post
As for the posting restrictions blame the zealous testers on the Beta forum for that, they spammed the Beta forum to hell and back, so SE introduced posting restrictions there, and probably was spooked so much about it that they introduced similar restrictions for posting here on the main forum when ARR launched as well, so as to prevent that happening again. So once again, 'this is why we can't have nice things.'
The beta was over four years ago. I have moderated forums with a large member base and they didn't have such an arbitrary restriction. It doesn't even work as a spam filter since everyone knows the workaround. Why they actually keep it is to filter spam, not that it works for that either. At this point, there simply isn't a good reason.