Thank you - yes, I figured it out later. So gradle.org definitely needs to enabled linked reply for new users (to dig out “Old Forum” posts).
Having linked reply disabled is just “for the UI to be less confusing” rather than “permission denied” ?
Is there a config setting to enable Reply as new topic in the right gutter for the new users?
Some years have passed since the above was posted April 2013; am I right to assume that pre-registration activity is still not taken into account?
(When a new user is blocked from posting, appearing on /queued-posts, their activity seems to indicate they just registered and immediately tried to create a new topic without even browsing around for a bit. In other words: it seems blocked users always have very low values for “Topics Viewed”, “Posts Read”, “Read Time” and “Days Visited”. But like @davidmiller wrote: if someone anonymously reads many topics but still cannot find what they’re looking for, then creating a new topic right after registering might not be strange. Of course, I understand tracking/matching pre-registration activity might be troublesome, so I’m merely trying to interpret the activity metrics.)