Should I make my own groups or use the trust_levels

[traceymoko (Tracey)]

@Jarjar

Is there a way to contact someone from Discourse to get in a call so I make sure I understood it all properly? Against compensation obviously.

Hey there, welcome to Discourse.

I would be happy to help you and walk you through doing these, as well as explain how trust levels and moderation work in Discourse and how to achieve what you want.

I’ve worked with Discourse forums since 2015 as moderator/administrator, and have worked in community management/moderation for a decade. I’ve also done administration & moderation on Discord, so I can explain the similarities and differences. I understand that if you’re coming from the roles-based model similar to that, it can be confusing since Discourse has a lot of built-in moderation associated with its trust levels.

Feel free to PM me, and we can figure out time to do a video call.

If you want, I would be happy to volunteer as a moderator/admin on your site for the medium-term to help you get set up. I really love working with Discourse and I want more communities to use it. (I’ve done volunteer admin/moderation on Discord too for a friend who was a streamer, because fiddling with all the bots and settings wasn’t her thing, so I totally get that because I like setting those up.)

If you want to open a topic in Marketplace and explain that you’re looking for support to set up Discourse, you can also do that.

All the things that you mention should be straightforward to explain and go through.

These are possible to do as Moin mentioned:

@Jarjar

TL3:

• Recategorize and rename topics => definitely don’t want users to do that
• Have all their links followed (we remove automatic nofollow) => no need

TL2:

• Use the “Invite others to this topic” button for one-click onboarding of new users to participate in topics => Definitely don’t want that
• Invite outside users to PMs making a group PM => don’t want that too, I want PM disabled for all users.

Moin mentioned all the settings here, but I can also help you go through those:

Should I make my own groups or use the trust_levels

Change edit all topic groups Change tl3 links no follow There is also invite allowed groups and personal message enabled groups I use Trust Level Permissions Reference to find the settings

And for this next part, I can explain the staff role.

@Jarjar

I’m a bit confused with the staff role since I don’t see the point of it, admins are admins and moderators are moderators.
Trying to understand that I came on an article that was saying that the default moderator was giving way too much perms to mods allowing them to export customer data for example and there is also category moderators so now I’m completely lost at sea: Admin vs Moderator vs leader - #14 by robmc

The staff role is mainly to indicate who is an admin/moderator on the site. Admins can change site settings & themes, and moderators on Discourse can handle suspensions, spam and so on. They are moderators for the whole site.

When people are looking for moderators to moderate the content on the site (close discussions, introduce slowmode), usually Trust Level 4 (Leader) is suited best for this.