Do you use the Lounge category on your community?

[stephtara (Stephanie Booth)]

Quoting what I just commented elsewhere on this topic:

@stephtara

@Simon_Manning

I’ve been less active here on meta recently so I’ve been bumped back down to TL2, losing access to Lounge. The user experience of gaining access to Lounge and then losing it, including my own posts as if they don’t exist, felt kind of weird to me.

An area for the most active users of course has its place in some communities but the default welcome topic doesn’t really emphasise that continued access is incumbent on continued levels of activity, which is probably part of why it felt weird despite knowing when and why I would lose access.

I personally find this very problematic.

In my current Facebook community, I have a policy that whenever somebody gains access to a restricted space (we have a bunch of Messenger chats with various subgroups to manage things, plus a secret admin facebook group on the side), they do not lose it even when they “give up” their role.

Being in a smaller, “behind the scenes” subgroup makes people bond, and this is also valuable for the community, and I don’t want people to “hang on” to a moderator or helper role because they don’t want to lose the feeling of community they have in that small group. I find it a bit brutal if changes to one’s activity in the community (for whatever reason… it can be lack of interest but it can also be “life happens”) result in being socially outcast.

So people can stick around. Of course they are free to leave if they want to. But usually they don’t. Unless there is conflict, of course, I don’t feel comfortable cutting people off from their contributions and a space of social relationships.

Much as I like the idea that people “automatically” appear in the lounge when they reach TL3, for the moment I’m reluctant to activate it for my community because of the “automatically disappearing” part.

And reading around a bit, I see this unease about the non-transparent inclusion/exclusion surrounding the Lounge being linked to TL3 is not new: Need a way to easily see who has access to the Lounge…

I get to differ with the analogy invoked here:

@codinghorror

The idea is that you actually don’t have access to the Frequent Flier’s Lounge if you no longer fly a lot on airplanes, though.

A community is not an airline which tries to incentivise consumption through perks – it’s a social space involving relationships and emotions.

[NateDhaliwal]

I do think the Lounge has some uses, for example on another forum I was on they used it as a way of notifying us of upcoming changes to the product before the news was released, so that we could give feedback and out views on it.

On the flip side, some use the Lounge or something similar to talk about others behind their backs, so that’s something I don’t like the Lounge sometimes. But in more peaceful/civil communities, it remains fairly quiet unless there’s something important.

I have been on some communities where honestly, the Lounge had nothing going on that getting TL3 access wouldn’t matter - you didn’t miss out much.

@stephtara

So people can stick around. Of course they are free to leave if they want to. But usually they don’t. Unless there is conflict, of course, I don’t feel comfortable cutting people off from their contributions and a space of social relationships.

Much as I like the idea that people “automatically” appear in the lounge when they reach TL3, for the moment I’m reluctant to activate it for my community because of the “automatically disappearing” part.

You might be able to add the user to a separate group once they become TL3, and have the Lounge tied to that group instead of the TL3 group. This way, when the user loses their TL3 status, they still have access to the restricted category.

[ToddZ]

@NateDhaliwal

You might be able to add the user to a separate group once they become TL3, and have the Lounge tied to that group instead of the TL3 group. This way, when the user loses their TL3 status, they still have access to the restricted category.

Ok that’s clever!

Looks like you could use the Discourse Automation action script User Group Membership through Badge and have it act on the “Regular” badge that’s issued with TL3.

Have the script add the user to a “Lounge_Lizards” Group that has access to a private Lounge category.

As a side benefit, you could manually add someone to that group if they’re special but haven’t reached TL3 (and if you don’t want to just promote them with all the TL3 privileges.)