Well, as was discussed in the earlier posts, to avoid reverse biasing, you would want to use a driver that only pulls cathodes low and anodes high, such as the MAX7221.
That's right. I was referring to the original responses posted almost 8 years ago (not your recent response). And yes, I resurrected this thread very late. 
The thing is, an Arduino can drive individual segments and can be programmed to pull in one direction only, defaulting to INPUT when not driving, but not drive the common return anyway.
Certainly, one could do that too, noting that it must be done when Charlieplexing. The funny thing is that there seems to be so many examples out there where this could be done, but isn't. Instead people just seem to want to set the output to high and low, not even considering that high Z is an option when set to input. But again, perhaps it's a non issue, since reverse biasing works fine in many/most cases.
Charlieplexing is always dependent not only on reverse biasing, but on three times the diode voltage drop exceeding the driving voltage.
Now you've got me wondering about that... isn't it more complex than 3Vf? In the case I believe you're referring to, you've got a single led in parallel with two series leds and you don't want your driving voltage to be so high as to light the series pair. Wouldn't the lower resistance single path tend to starve the two led series path (which is why running leds in parallel is generally not a good thing to do), and wouldn't it also depend on the particular current limiting resistor values used? So yes, there is a limit to the driving voltage, but is it exactly 3Vf?