Just a quick update on this, I have made the pinned post clearer exactly how long and how many posts need to be read, so this should hopefully give a bit more information to new members without feeding the spambots what they need to get past our anti-spam controls.
I would consider a category which is open to Level 0 posting if we had a few more active moderators on the forum - at present I am the only person moderating, and I am only available in UK timezones +/- a few days a week where I work later.
So definitely something for the Education/Community teams to consider going forward but we don’t really have the resources right at this moment.