Just being curious here.
Admins of Discourse forums, do you use the Lounge category? Do you explain it yourself to your members or just let the default trust level 3 description does its job?
Is it actually used, and for what purpose?
Feel free to share any thoughts about this special category in general or in your own Discourse forum (or other forums you are members of).
We have an “off topic” category which I guess is a bit like a lounge.
It’s only visible to TL1 so is quickly accessible by new members and while there are no trade secrets in there, we don’t want it being indexed by search engines as it would take away from the main content of our site.
The description reads:
It’s a hugely popular category and a place that really allows the community members to get to know each other.
Popular (daily) discussions include reality TV shows, live discussions during live sporting events, recommendations for purchases, discount and coupon codes, other hobbies (eg. Motorcycles, camping, etc), online gaming, volcanoes, and general current affairs.
More obscure topics cover things like vehicle tyres, DIY home repairs, Lego 
My top tip for such a category? Much like the offline world you’ll quickly find that politics, religion and covid always divide. We don’t ban any of these subjects but we do warn people early on if it looks to be going south. A short reminder is sometimes posted to remind people to respect others views and to remain civil.
So, this is kinda a custom Lounge category.
I completely forgot it, but we decided on our own forum that the off-topic category would be available only for TL1 users, exactly like your case (though it’s not very popular in our forum).
My question is specifically about the default Lounge category as it ships with Discourse, but your reply is interesting because after all, the only difference between Lounge and a “custom lounge” is that the Lounge is inherent to Discourse.
I’m TL3 (On the Codecademy forums) so I can only say what’s public about the category and not the private stuff about it.
I get access open-door access to CMs and HQ staff, invitations to events and roundtables, first to know about betas and stuff related to it.
All the stuff I said above is from this topic. And TL3 their is called Super User or SU.
Do you use the Lounge category on your community?
The last post was in October of 2020.
In the communities I am in the lounge category is never used for anything by staff or TL3. There doesn’t seem to be any general things TL3 want to talk about 
Well, not wanting to brag or be accused of making things up, but ours here on Meta is borderline too much fun. 
And very active @JammyDodger
On one of the forums I’m on the lounge is very active as well as the tl4 sub cat in it. On on other forum there was a new topic every 1-2 weeks before something happened.
#Lounge? Here? One posting once in every two weeks is defenetly borderline one 
Or… you damned have secret lounge somewhere. You b…… 
People automatically lose TL3 status/access if they take a break from the forum, so it seems like it would be difficult to have an active section that only TL3 people can post in, unless they are locked at TL3.
There is more general reason too, I reckon. TLs have nothing common ground because they have same TL because they are just more active than most others.
For me (including users of my forum) such lounges are just as unfamiliar and even un-comfortable than badges.
On my main forum, I don’t have a lounge, but I created a section for members that requires TL0 to view. I found it useful. There isn’t much content there, but if someone posts about mental health issues or something that shouldn’t end up in Google Search results, I move it into the members area where it won’t be scraped or crawled.
Kinda the same on my unicycling forum. There’s an off-topic category for TL1 users, where there are occasional silly or political talks. I made the restriction to prevent the topics from being shown on the search engines, and TL1 is acquired very fast, though it implies that someone showed enough interest in the forum to be allowed to discuss other things on it.
It’s less used than in the past. I’m not sure why, but I think there are several factors.
What bothers me with the TL3 Lounge here on Discourse, is that my trust level varies between 2 and 3 depending on my activity, so there are times where I can’t follow discussions anymore that interested me in the lounge until I’m TL3 again… 
I’ve been here for eight years, can I get an invite? 
I removed the Uncategorized category and basically use the Lounge category for that purpose. The benefits? You can now force people to set a category before posting, which improves organization. Lounge is not a dark web element anymore (it can be indexed and visible to all) and the “Uncategorized” category, which is now Lounge, can have subcategories. Another nice thing is that I’ve enabled a Chat channel for the Lounge category as the default channel. Making the uncategorized and thus doesn’t need a topic or category flow consistent.
But have you changed the permissions on the Lounge category to make it public? If not, only a very limited number of people can see the content and search engines definitely can’t.
I’m afraid it’s based on the normal TL3 requirements rather than longevity, so you’d have to do a fair bit more reading first. Though, as @Jagster pointed out, I am actually making things up and our lounge is as equally under-utilised as most other commenters on here, so don’t feel like you’re missing out on anything.
This actually sounds a lot like the new setup with the General category that’s being rolled out for new sites at the moment (as long as you have opened up lounge to @everyone, that is) - This discussion is general - #2 by JammyDodger I think you’re a couple of steps ahead, but the direction seems very similar to what it will be soon.
It’s indeed open for TL0 and above.
I made #lounge public on my forum to all users and regulars can go to #r-lounge, which is private to regulars.
It works pretty well for getting engagement up.
But for anybody else wondering, the regular lounge is dead.
We do have a few cool threads
I’m sorry I had to
