The discussion revolves around a bug where admins are unable to split topics for new users due to the daily topic limit, even when acting as administrators. EricGT encountered this issue and found that increasing the ‘max topics in first day’ setting allowed the split to proceed. codinghorror confirmed it’s a long-standing bug where the new topic check applies to the user’s first-day limits, not admin privileges. They advise against permanently altering the limit due to potential abuse. EricGT shares that his site, SWI-Prolog Discourse, has safely maintained a higher limit (7) since September 2019, attributing this to a small, responsible user base with high education levels and minimal spam, though he notes the issue hasn’t recurred since the original post.
My view is that even as an admin I should be allowed to exceed the new user daily limit.
EDIT
While the message was still active, I went in as admin to Settings - Rate Limits - max topics in first day and bumped it from 3 (default) to 7. After than I clicked Move to New Topic and it worked as expected.
Nice job on allowing admin changes to take effect during a admin action. I know the pages are stateless, but it is nice to see it in action. Maybe you could use that one for a demo.
Yes, we’ve had this unfortunate bug for years. The new topic is checked against the permission of the “first day” user. It just doesn’t come up a whole lot in the wild, which is why we never took the time to properly fix it yet.
I also advise you NOT to keep this setting modified as it’ll open your site up to abuse.
I do appreciate your advise and agree with it. For now I will leave it and keep an eye on what happens. I am noting this because it seems you like to hear about the use of Discourse when it exceeds a norm.
Just an FYI for a site that is an outlier regarding
Rate Limit - max topics in first day
(SWI-Prolog Discourse link)
A while back I changed our value from 3 to 7 and noted I would give some feedback.
Since I changed it on 09/19/2019, (133 days ago), I have not noticed any problems related to this change.
The reason I noted I consider our site an outlier is that it is a small community and that most of the active users have a masters degree of education or more or the equivalent of related experience.
While we do get new users they act responsibly on the site. Also I spend so little time in dealing with spam, I can only recall having to take action only once or twice in several months of having admin rights and the other admins seem to like that I do more of the admin work, so I don’t think they are spending any significant time on spam either.
