In a discussion titled ‘Promote all users to TL1’ under the Support category, fefrei seeks to promote ~100 newly registered users from trust level 0 to TL1 so their topics appear in digests to help bootstrap their university course forum. davemaxwell suggests either manually promoting users or lowering TL1 requirements to zero for automatic promotion. fefrei tries lowering requirements and confirms users will be promoted upon next activity, but later uses the API for immediate promotion. codinghorror warns against setting default TL to 1 unless accounts are strictly vetted, as it removes spam resistance. fefrei acknowledges the risk but notes their context — a non-public, university course forum — makes spam unlikely, and emphasizes the warning: This eliminates almost all of Discourse’s spam-resistance. riking humorously observes that signing up for a university course is akin to paid vetting. The thread highlights trade-offs between community growth and spam control, with context-specific solutions.
In my new installation, about 100 users have signed up already. Most of them are still trust level 0.
I just realized that their topics will not be included in digests, which is bad – I want to use the digests to bootstrap the community. To remedy this, I set the default trust level to 1 (it’s okay – we don’t have realistic chances of spam posts).
How can I promote all my current users to trust level 1 if they’re still at 0?
You could manually promote everyone, or reduce the Tl1 requirements to allow Discourse to do the promotions automatically.
Oh thanks – I didn’t get the idea of dropping the requirements to zero 
I just set all tl1 requirements to 0, and will see what happens.
This should promote the users as soon as that are active on the site again, right?
I ended up using the API to do the promotion, since I was too impatient to wait for automatic promotion. Thanks!
Just do not set the default trust level to 1 unless you have extremely strict (paid) account vetting.
In my case, I’m sure there is no risk of spam – this installation is an internal forum for a course at university; it’s not even obvious that signing up will give you access to a forum.
But it’s good to put that warning out there: This eliminates almost all of Discourse’s spam-resistance.
Signing up for a university course sounds like paid vetting to me 