Anyone who's posted on both the original site and this new one will notice that you no longer get the notice of how many posts you have left. There are a few reasons for this.
One reason is scalability - every time you viewed a topic and got the reply at the bottom the server needed to look at your account, count the number of posts in the last 24 hours and work out what to display. Caching at various places meant this number would sometimes be wrong and there's nothing worse than posting something and it failing.
I went back to basics and thought about what the limits were for and how they could be improved to still protect the site but also give a better user experience.
Limits are there for several reasons: to protect against spammers and blabbermouths. Spammers are obvious - we don't want them and while it's fairly easy to delete an account and purge all their posts, it's much better to limit how much damage and disruption they can do.
Blabbermouths are just people who talk a lot, maybe too much, LOL. Seriously, I don't think anyone hit's limits in normal use but if people are posting like it's a chat system then they will be more likely to. Limits help constrain some people from taking over, they tend to believe in Jesus and want to tell us all about him all the time. Sometimes they need help shutting up.
The other reason is as a milder, half-way measure to temporary or permanent bans. If someone is being a nuisance or has lost their temper it sometimes helps to just limit how much they can post for a short while if they are determined to post insults or nonsense.
But not everyone is either of those - the majority of people post more thoughtful posts and never hit the limit but sometimes people are deep in conversation and in those cases it would be nice to not have the limits be as imposing.
Remember how when you post it now goes through being submitted and then queued before being processed? This is because things are "asynchronous" (not everything needs to be done all at once while you wait for it) which helps with reliability and scalability. So what do these things actually do?
Submitted means the server has received the post and it has been saved. THERE IS NO NEED TO SUBMIT IT AGAIN. Processed means that it's been checked, the HTML has been cleaned, the text indexed, images extracted and the post has been added to the topic (or the new topic created and added to the subject area), posting counts updated etc...
The interesting piece is the bit in the middle:
Queued means that the server has put it in the queue to be processed. Now here is the key bit - the posting limits are applied after you post and take advantage of the queue to delay when things are processed, normally posts are queued to be processed immediately (as soon as the server can) but if you "hit' the limit (now hopefully a much softer impact) then all that happens is the post will spend slightly more time in the queue which means there will be a delay before it appears.
No hard limit of post denied - it's still accepted and will appear (hence the NO NEED TO SUBMIT IT AGAIN), just not immediately.
The more people post over the limit, the longer the timeout period becomes. The ramp-up should be gradual and barely noticeable to regular posters.
So, if you post something and it is taking a little longer to appear then maybe just take a break. It will appear, there is no need to post it again (if you do then you'll be spamming) and you don't have to wait for it to appear.
Now people shouldn't find the posting limits quite as intrusive but at the same time I can still protect against spam (because things in the queue can be cancelled if needed).