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.
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.
The Lounge category is no longer included with new installations, but you could certainly recreate the concept, and adjust your site’s TL3 thresholds so that it’s easier to achieve and/or retain.
Just filter settings for “TL3” to see all the options. TL3 promotion min duration is probably the key here – set it to 10,000 days or something.
Edit: note that TL3 includes a bunch of advanced permissions for using the site – not just category access:
As near as I can tell, references to built-in messaging on promotion to TL3 are outdated, and those site texts were removed when the Lounge category was removed from the default config. Today you’d need to use Discourse Automation to send a custom welcome message when people reach TL3.
So I believe re-creating a Lounge would take:
Create a category limited to TL3
Create automatic PM upon TL3 promotion with a link or reference to the category
I’m pretty sure you can lock someone at TL3… so you could just lock people there as you seen them reach that level. (As someone else pointed out though, TL3 unlocks a lot of administrative powers too.)
whoops, didn’t realise it was not in there anymore. I guess reading about it left and right had me assuming it was still actual. IMHO, good move removing it. But will think about fiddling with those TL3 settings to see if they can serve my needs!
This is the correct answer 
