I'll be honest, I don't remember.

It's sort of a "We RP'ers don't want scummy trader monkeys on our server, so we refuse to allow them to peddle their evil on our boards" kind of thing, I would guess. It was in place when Jaxy and Apep ran the boards with an iron fist, and the current admin has elected to continue the policy.

I'd recommend a PM to Kaileena to see how she feels about it, or perhaps to encourage her to get a discussion running amongst the mods to get a consensus.