By default the Lounge category is for trust level user_level_3. I’m considering reconfiguring it (change the security, and edit the About topic) to be for my user_level_2 people.
I have an inner circle of paying users who have their own category that only they can use. And I have no user_level_3 users (coming up on a year) — I had one user make it to 3 briefly, but clearly my Lounge isn’t being used in the near future.
Anyone see any pitfalls that I’m not thinking of, is there any in-built magic I’m not aware of around the Lounge category and user_level_3 ?
I’d be inclined to just create your own separate category rather than trying to repurpose lounge. And just make everyone who’s one of those paying users be in the “inner circle” category. Or if you really want TL2, then do that. It’s not hard to get tl2, though.
But you could track down all of the places that lounge is mentioned in everything (maybe you’ve found them already?)
lounge_welcome.body is the content for the welcome topic inside the Lounge category, as far as I can tell editing it has no effect. Same with lounge_welcome.title, vip_category_name and vip_category_description, I think they’re just seeds for creating the Lounge category.
There isn’t an explicit message sent to users when they reach TL3 but they are granted a badge and a notification is created for that, so badges.regular.long_description might be the closest to what you’re looking for.
An advantage to my mind is that users can reach and never (unless manually done by admin) lose TL2, so it’s a one-way street of engaging with the community to some degree (which can of course be adjusted by admin) and then gaining access to additional resources.
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 don’t think there is any magic with the Lounge category (there is with Staff) but the welcome topic does have useful information about what a TL3 user can do and it doesn’t really cost anything to leave it there.
If you don’t think TL3 will be useful for your community, you can disable it and avoid some users briefly obtaining it by setting tl3 requires days visited to 101, i.e. tl3 time period + 1.
This is the correct answer 
