I have several Categories that require at least 1 tag for a new post. The problem is that you can only create a tag (by default) if you’re at trust level 3. As a result, people below trust level 3 can’t create posts.
I’ve “solved” this by lowering the trust-level down to 0. I suppose that I could also set the required tags to 0, but that defeats the purpose.
How should I handle this?
– Geoff
You offer some tags to lower trustlevels to use, but not create — that is the most common way, I think. And let higher/moderators/staff create new ones when needed.
Or you let users create tags as they will, and then hight tl/moderators/staff fix tags if needed. On my forum this is in use, because creating tags isn’t an issue at all, but not use those is. So, low barrier.
Problem solved 
Yep – you can create a tag group, then per category, require that posts get a tag from that group. (See Category Setting | Tags)
So, basically, the default trust level required to create a tag is stupid if you want people to utilize tags. No one can create posts with tags, as they don’t have a high enough trust level, which they’ll never achieve because they can’t post. This is a chicken-and-egg issue. In this case, the person had created 64 posts, over many years.
I “solved” it by lowering the trust level to 0, which is what I think the default should be.
I think you are misunderstanding? We meant letting users create posts with existing tags. New tags can be created by users from higher TLs. [1] The problem with lowering it to TL0 is that spam accounts could come in and mass create spam and useless tags, creating lots of moderation work.
Following the 1st part of Jakke’s post. ↩︎