Disclaimer: I’m still new to Discourse. I’m using it to teach online classes at the university where I teach.
I had a student complain that he couldn’t post and he’d tried all kinds of things (different computers, different browsers, different locations) but still couldn’t post. The error message he was getting when trying to post his work was
"Something has gone wrong. Perhaps this topic was closed or deleted while you were looking at it?"
which is the topic_not_found error. I poked around a bit more and finally realized that his account was blocked. It would be nice if the error message reflected that so that he or I could have figured out the problem a bit quicker.
I don’t know why he was blocked. Perhaps too many accounts got created from the university (which is behind NAT, so it looks like one IP address)? On a related note (which might need another topic?) it might be nice if there were a way to whitelist an IP range and/or a email domain. I also went crazy when I had a bunch of students log in during the first class and was flummoxed that they couldn’t reply because they were still Level 0 users. (In the future, I can change the initial user level for the first week or so of class, or make them read the syllabus in Discourse before I have them try to post.)
blocking happens only in two cases, either when the user is new and posts a bunch of links to the same site, or when the user is new and triggers some spam heuristics. Both result in flags being cast and visible.
there is no restriction on replying at trust level 0, I suspect you are thinking of private messaging
if a bunch of new users sign up from the same IP, they will be prevented from signing up beyond a certain number. See your site settings.
You should check your admin dashboard for flags.
It can be safe to set default trust level to 1 if you are absolutely sure they are vetted users.
Ah. It’s not replying, it’s creating topics, and what I wanted people to do is reply-as-linked-topic, and I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t showing up.
Lots of users are having trouble finding reply-as-linked-topic, which I suppose in a typical situation is a feature used only by people who are pretty adept with using Discourse.
I do need to pay more attention to flags on the dashboard. If I had, I’d have noticed this user was blocked.
I think I’d figured out the TL0 thing, but it seems that it sometimes takes it a while to show up. Like now (as I type this message), I don’t see the “reply as linked topic” link, but if I move my cursor out of the editor it does.
This seems a bit confusing–when you are looking at a message and have the cursor on the reply button, you can’t see that there is a “reply as linked topic” option.