With what BoyScout and nightmare are worried about - whilst there is a restriction of freedom, it may well be hardly a restriction at all. At GameFAQs newbies have the status:
Provisional (1) - Created with Freemail/AOL/WebTV. Upgraded to New User after 48 hours with positive Karma. Can create 1 topic, 10 messages per day (3 per hour).
Now most members should be more than happy with those restrictions, since most members post at most twice a day on most days, let alone wanting to make ten posts a day. And generally, members don't have to make new topics all that often; a newcomer needing assistance can simply put all of their questions in the one topic.
What the restriction
does do, however, is make sure that the user isn't
too bad - they can't spam non-stop (not that they can't spam at all). One of the alternatives is to review all their posts so that they can be approved or disapproved, until they reach a satisfactory number of approved posts (the idea that IP came up with), but I imagine that this would give admins/staff more work than it's worth.