In our community, we would like to be able to restrict muting users to people who have gained some experience with the community.
Would it be possible to add an option to choose who is able to mute other users?
AI-generated summary
The discussion revolves around a feature request to restrict the ability to mute users to specific trust levels, particularly TL2, in Discourse. Steradiant explains that their community, transitioning from a mailing list to Discourse, wants to prevent new users from accidentally muting others, which could lead to missed notifications. They note that muting is currently available at TL1, but they prefer to limit it to TL2, where users have more experience. Heliosurge clarifies that the ignore feature has a site setting for allowed groups, typically TL2, and questions why mute doesn’t have a similar setting, suggesting ignore and mute should share permissions. JammyDodger encourages Steradiant to elaborate on their use case. Heliosurge suggests a workaround using CSS or custom components to hide mute options for lower trust levels, referencing existing solutions for hiding likes.
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There is a site setting for ignore users - allowed groups. Not sure if discourse separates ignore from mute.
Default I believe is TL2 is one of the default groups.
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Yes, it does. Muting is available starting at TL1, usually.
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Hello and welcome @Steradiant 
If you could go into a bit more detail about the use case you have in mind for this, or any problems you’ve been having without it, that can help make the case for an additional setting more compelling. 
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Yeah I found it odd not seeing an option directly for mute. In theory ignore and mute should be the same permission setting imho. With ignore just being an option for perm mute.
On my sites mute hasn’t been an issue. We have only ever had in 8 years 1 member who received iirc default 5 users mute them. Triggering a system message to the muted user and mods.
It worked as with just the system message he made an apology post as hadn’t realized he was being a bit toxic with his negativity
We are currently setting up a Discourse server for our community, where it is supposed to replace a mailinglist as a better and more fine-grained means of official debates within our association.
As all users who have access to the forum are pre-confirmed from another service and mostly know each other from real life, we let users start with TL1, to very quickly advance to TL2.
While we do not have any experience from practice, we fear that an overwhelmed user might accidentally mute someone in their first few days and later miss important notifications. By keeping this option to TL2, we hope to avoid that.
For similar reasons, we have currently disabled the Ignore Users feature, fearing it might create confusion in binding decision processes, even though we are considering to reenable it for TL3 or above.
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One in term solution might be to use CSS to hide mute user option buttons from trust level 2 however not sure myself on the coding or if there might caveats with higher TL having previous to.
Though maybe at a guess basic logic not group TL2 display none?
This Customization > Theme component can likely be used as reference to build a custom component to hide mute options. As it hides likes for new users
This one uses JS but am pretty sure should be able to use a pure CSS solution.
Here is a hide like Button with CSS
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