Hi - is there any way of turning this ‘feature’ off? We have a very low-volume private community (where all new users are pre-vetted before being invited to the community), so this change is extremely detrimental to us.
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Hey, in the admin settings I guess there is an option to disable the same, you can go to All site settings and search for hide user and uncheck the boxes 
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You can also raise the trust level of new members to TL1.
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Hey @MihirR - I don’t think there is - not that I can find anyway!
Hey @tobiaseigen - that wouldn’t really solve the problem of “TL1 users cannot see any user profiles for users with 0 posts except for staff users” - they still wouldn’t be able to see the profiles of other users who haven’t posted yet.
Also, we wouldn’t want to lose one of the 4 trust layers, which obviously have a lot of uses.
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Thanks, Robin! Can you explain your use case a little more so we can understand it better? How many of your members have never posted? Will they ever post? Why would you have members in your community who never contribute?
Is your site invite only and private?
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Hey @tobiaseigen, I imagine it’s a fairly common use case - connecting a community of practitioners to share knowledge - obviously only a small percentage of whom contribute on a regular basis, and some may join the community and take months before they first need to ask a question (or decide to answer someone else’s), or indeed may never post at all.
Even if they never post, there’s still value for them in reading what’s being shared in the community, and there’s still value for other members to browse the user directory and see them there and view their profiles (and to be able to PM them).
From a community perspective, it’s important that everyone sees that, although there are relatively few posts/contributors, that actually the vast majority of practitioners out there are members of the community - i.e. this is the place to share knowledge as the right people will see you sharing it.
The community is invite-only - in fact, I’m the only person who can invite people (although people can send me a request to be invited, and I’ll then vet them to make sure they are a practitioner) - and it’s private and not viewable on the public web or visible to search engines.
We insist that everyone uses their real full name in the community and the organisation they represent is also shown on their profile (and I will add/change this manually after sign-up if necessary, as I already have this information for each invited user, along with their org’s website URL etc).
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Hi Robin, one possible solution if you use Invites.
Create a user group say “Practitioners” you can also add members manually when needed. Have the group setup to bump Trust level to 2 or 3.
Automation plugin included in core can also likely use a script based on a user Feild to bump to or add to group.
May still need to check with team to see if TL2+ is not affected by viewing user list. However if the group allows members to view members of the group this might work as a workaround to the site setting(would need to be tested)
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@Heliosurge - I’d rather have a solution that involved an admin setting that allowed me to turn this ‘functionality’ off!
What you’re suggesting is that I automatically/manually promote all of my users to Trust Level 2. That doesn’t feel like a great solution to me!
Only about 6% of our users have made it on their own to Trust Level 2 so far, and have nice little badges on their profiles to prove it…
Basically what this ‘feature’ implies is that the Trust Level system in Discourse is now broken by design!
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Can I run a program that will just trust the admin just completely unhide the admin
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I can definitely appreciate where your coming from. At this moment though a workaround is likely the quickest unless this can be turned off via command line. As there are site settings that are not in the web interface and can be adjusted there.
Maybe if not the team might consider pushing an option to set/adjust this change. If not I imagine a Plugin could be sponsored via Marketplace to add the option in the web interface.
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Welcome to Discourse 
!
Your question is a bit unclear. Can you give further explanation to help with clarity? Maybe an example.
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And that is important why? For me it looks more like you are using too tight rules.
No, it is not 
@Jagster - We’re just using the default Discourse rules out of the box - we haven’t tweaked them at all. Our community has only been live for 9 months.
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But… if you don’t adjust settings and are using defaults instead, that isn’t a sign of brokenness. It just tells you that you don’t use settings 
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I wonder what’s the process, when adding a feature, for deciding whether it needs tunable settings? It feels to me like this feature could indirect through settings, to make it tunable (or indeed possible to disable.)
Of course on a big active forum there will be lots of chaff signups and lots of pre-spammer signups, but that’s not the only use of the software.
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Then maybe just make them tl2 when you approve them?
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I agree on all the opinions here tho I do support @Robin.Grant and there should be a tunable setting for it :))
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I agree this feature needs further tweaking. I’ve shared your concern internally already. You’ve caught us during a time when many of us are on leave, so please bear with us - we’ll get more eyes on this topic in the next week or so.
Thanks Robin for sharing your use case! It’s not so different from a small private discourse community I manage for my local neighborhood. I invite everyone personally, and as they join they specify their street address and contact phone number. I verify this information personally and correct/add it as needed.
Many of these people don’t ever actually log in again or participate in discussions, but they need to be visible in the directory so their neighbors can get to know them and know how to reach them.
Promoting them to TL2 is an option on my site because badges are not so relevant, but still it’s awkward to promote 100+ existing members without jumping through a bunch of hoops requiring insider knowledge or doing alot of menial clicking through the admin user list.
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More than reviewing their addresses and phone numbers manually?
It was a chunk of work at the beginning but that was years ago and is a distant memory. Now the community pretty much runs itself and I only occasionally have to make an update when people leave and join the community.
If I had to go through and update them all now it would be inconvenient and does feel like it should not be necessary.
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