Hey Brian, welcome!
I’m digging through the screenshots you’ve shared, and something caught my eye. On page 2, I noticed that you’re listed as an “owner” of trust_level_0. That shouldn’t be possible…the trust level groups are automatic, and thus do not have owners. Does that screenshot show all your groups, or just the first 8?
At the moment, given that the wallflowers (TL0) group has create/reply/see permissions on the Lobby category, all users of the site have full permissions there. I understand that’s not what you’re going for, and is for testing, but that likely means something else is wrong if a TL1 user can’t post there.
Also, note that trust levels are hierarchical - all members of TL4 are also members of TL3, TL2, TL1, and TL0. TL3 members are also members of TL2, TL1, TL0, etc. As such, if you add TL0 (wallflowers) to a category’s security settings, you don’t also have to add TL1, TL2, TL3, and TL4 unless you want them to have different permissions.
The same goes with staff users. The staff group is an automatic group made up of all moderators and admins. As such, if you add the staff group to a category’s security settings, no need to also add admins and moderators.
Can you please confirm the following:
- That the groups page screenshot shows all groups, and not just the first 8.
- Your Discourse version
- That you installed following our official install guide
- Is your test user trying to create a new topic, or reply to an existing topic?
- Remove admins, members, moderators, onboarding, TL3, and TL4 from the lobby permissions and try posting again.