1) Fix it so that you can have paragraphs with an empty line between them. Nothing is worse than spending time to come up with a thoughtful response only to have it squashed into a mass of words that no one wants to attempt to read. The formatting of the posts here lends itself to a lot of "tl;dr" going on.
2) Get rid of the requirement to have X characters in a message. If this was the My Little Pony forum where tons of teenage girls post only "omg", and "lol" I could understand such a requirement. Instead of punishing everyone why not simply get rid of that and scold anyone who abuses it? This is a self moderated forum, right?