Sorry about that. Upped your trust level to “member”, which you certainly are! So feel free to try it again 
The problem is a lot of the metrics getting to the next trust level (discourse’s way of encouraging participation and discouraging spam) do rely on in-forum participation. I’ll follow that up on the discourse meta.
However, I’m not very hopeful there will be any other solution than manual approval. For this reason, I’ve edited the original post to include note that users in that situation should notify the moderators (like you did).