How many TL3 users do you have? Do the TL3 requirements really make sense?

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Thanks all for the discussion and the sharing! This has been very helpful!

What I take from this is a confirmation that something’s off in the default TL3 requirements - at least for high-volume communities. It’s been very interesting to know that a lot of you who have TL3 users promoted at least some of them manually - even in lower-volume communities than we have.

Thanks @Falco for your suggestion that I work at adjusting the requirements based on our top users. In fact, that’s what I had been looking at, using the TL3 gap report I shared about a year ago. With that report, I’m able to add additional columns with different criteria to see whether/how much different values change the outcome. E.G.:

E.G. 
SELECT  pr.user_id, 
        greatest(50-coalesce(pr.visits,0),0) as "Days visited gap",

        greatest(10-coalesce(trt.replied_count,0), 0)  as "Topic reply gap",
        greatest(5-coalesce(trt.replied_count,0), 0)  as "Topic reply gap2",

        greatest(tclhd.all_topics-coalesce(tva.topic_id,0),0) AS "Topics Viewed last 100d gap",
        greatest(150-coalesce(tva.topic_id,0),0) AS "Topics Viewed last 100d gap2",

        greatest(200-coalesce(tvat.topic_id,0),0) as "Topic viewed (AT) gap",

        greatest(pclhd.all_posts - coalesce(pr.posts_read,0),0) as "Posts Read last 100d gap",
        greatest(250 - coalesce(pr.posts_read,0),0) as "Posts Read last 100d gap2",

Where I’m at so far is

  • 50 days visited lhd (last 100d) - most of the users I would expect to see at tl3 meet this already
  • 5 topic replies lhd

I’m still struggling with the criteria that are related to community volume. Right now I’m at

  • 150 topic views lhd
  • 250 post views lhd

That would get us to… 3 TL3 users. And while 3 users seems small to me, I would have to go far lower on topic views to increase that number. So this is probably where we’ll land.

@piffy I like the idea of expanding the tl3 duration and will probably do that too, so thanks for sharing it!

Regarding likes, some people here have questioned it, but after some thought, it makes a lot of sense to me to require that users get likes (as evidence that they’re actually positive contributors, rather than just prolific spewers). It also makes sense to me that we require high-level users to encourage others, which is kinda how I see giving likes. We’ve looked briefly just Friday at the Reactions plugin which may…? be a way to address cultural reluctance to stick a red heart on something…? @Ed_S do you think the option of a :+1: versus a :heart: would make a different for your users?

To answer your question @tobiaseigen, the reason this has come up in our community is what I shared originally:

Staff are all granted TL4, but we wondered what our colleagues’ “natural trust levels” were and started digging into that. That’s when we realized that Colin and I - whose full time job it is to work in the community - are the only people who would ever make TL3 with the default requirements. And it kinda seems wrong that it has to be your full-time job in order to meet the requirements for TL3.

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