You can only post in the Newbie and Local sub-forums till you have 5 posts and at least 4 hours on the forum. The other two restrictions are you need 1 post to be able to send a PM and 10 posts to put a link in your sig.
Since this restriction does not apply to Chinese sub-forum, there are so many stupid and meaningless newbie messages there, just to circumvent this restriction.
At the end of the day, how this restriction useful if people could just make 10 stupid posts in 10 minutes? It just increases the server's burden for absolutely nothing.