personally I find it very annoying that new(ish) user cant have clickable links, and other users have to copy and paste links to get to demos, capx files etc. I also think that this makes the forum look unprofessional. I do on the other hand understand the need to have a system to stop spammers.
There is a soulation that I have seen on many forums, and also used myself. This is to have a forum called "introduce yourselves" (I know we have a thread, but it should be a forum). When a new user signs up, all forum features, apart from reading are disabled, however the "introduce yourselves" forum is fully functional, in other words a new user must post in the "introduce yourself" before they can do anything else. this forum needs to be monitored. after the new users post has been approved by a moderator then unrestricted access to the rest of the forum is granted