The discussion is about configuring trust levels in a Discourse instance with vetted users. IanManning wants to know if it’s possible to have fewer trust levels, specifically two, and how to achieve this. NateDhaliwal suggests increasing the requirements for certain levels to make them unreachable, and notes that manually promoting users to TL4 is an alternative to removing permissions. JammyDodger proposes changing the default trust level to TL1 and making TL3 unachievable by setting the required days visited to 101, effectively limiting the automatic trust levels to TL1 and TL2.
I’m configuring a Discourse instance where all our users will come from a known (OIDC) source an will essentially already have been vetted. I assume there is no way to “turn off” trust levels?
If I wanted to effectively have less levels, eg just 2, would I do that by eg setting the default to 2, then change all the “requires” for level 1 to 0 and remove the permissions for level 4 if that makes sense? or is there a simpler way to achieve such a thing?
Hi @IanManning , welcome to the Meta!
You can take a look at this similar topic, it may help:
You could, (IIRC) like what OP said in that topic, increase the requirements so high that it cannot be reached easily (or not at all?).
This may not be necessary, since TL4s have to be manually promoted, so you can promote them only if you trust them to use those permissions, if not, don’t promote them at all.
I hope this helps!
Hello and welcome @IanManning 
If you’re community is closed to public registrations (and therefore safe from spam signups) then you can change the default trust level to TL1 and forgo the spam protection element that TL0 provides. You can also change tl3 requires days visited to ‘101’ to make it impossible to achieve, which would then leave you with TL1 and TL2 as the only automatic trust levels remaining.