Alright, some backstory.
Ever since our community went from manual approval to automated entry our “development discussion” category, which is a category meant for discussing the art of making things on the game engine, was always locked behind a trust level gate. We have a plugin to prevent TL0 users from posting at all, except for replying to DMs, the way they get promoted to TL1 is by regularly reading on the forum until they meet a hard requirement, which can post and create topics in most places. That development discussion category mentioned was always locked to TL0 and TL1 users, so only TL2 could reply and create topics.
TL1 users could post there, but they had to go through a manual approval system. There were other categories that were TL2+ as well but TL1 users again had to go through the same approval system as well.
Eventually the restriction for replies in the development discussion categories was lifted, so TL1 users could reply but still not create topics. According to the members of the team behind the manual approval (this team was called “Post Approval”), 80%+ of the topics requested were instantly rejected for being off-topic or just straight up non-sense. Eventually they took the development discussion category off of post approval, so TL1 users couldn’t create any more topics at all, not even through approval system.
The team was already dealing with a ton of backlog, so they had to remove it. Keep in mind these members were unpaid volunteers that did it whenever they were ready to handle the requests so having them do more work was unreasonable.
Eventually after a few months, a change happened. They completely opened the category to TL1 users! They could even create topics without approval as well! This led to huge outcry, from TL2 users, but surprisingly some TL1 users as well! Many topics were made by many people that disagreed, replying to them expressing their being upset in our meta discussion category. A community leader of the community came out with this statement:
“It is unlikely that [Development] Discussion will be locked down again because it fulfills a use-case that all members of the forum have. Locking it down previously was a legacy mechanism for rate-limiting new posts into that category, which is why you did not see as many low quality topics as you are seeing now.”
And another community leader had said that they were open to suggestions so that the higher-ups (the team that actually runs the forum) could consider them as long as they “weren’t attacking TL1 users” and that we should just resort to flags. But flags are a band-aid solution: they don’t solve the underlying problem which is the fact that these users are not thinking their topics thoroughly before posting or posting just for the sake of posting to get their stats up. Both said closing off categories was toxic “anti-forum” behavior however isn’t the point of trust levels to show which users have been more trusted? What does TL1 and TL2 mean? What is even the point of us having 2 different trust levels? (im purposely exclusing 3 and 4, they are kinda the leaders so not manual unlike tl1 and tl2 here) Gradually, the standards for newer users have been dropping. The restrictions once imposed on TL1 are getting all lifted, and has led to an increase of flags and literal abuse of categories. While I agree they shouldn’t be too limited since that would be extremely detrimental to their experience, we shouldn’t give TL1 too much.
About a month after this was in place the post approval process itself was phased out. As mentioned, select community members were volunteering, they weren’t paid, so it was unreasonable to give them more workload or to have them just manning the post approval inbox longer. Some have even reported that the workflow was starting to affect their mental health. They handled in total over a thousand requests. There is a “Post Approved” badge which is earned by members who have successfully gone through the post approval system with little/no changes at all.
In total it has been earned exactly 600 times; however this badge can be earned multiple times by the same user so under 600 people posts got approved out of the thousands.
“bug report” and “feature request” are categories used for literally what the name implies they are used for. The “starting that discussion” bit is outdated from when the discussion category had post approval on it. These categories needed post approval, but since post approval got removed, TL1 users haven’t been able to make feature requests or bug reports anymore, which has gotten its own outcry from TL1 as well. The users that are actually able to properly start a feature request/bug report can’t anymore, and this has led to them being put in the discussion category which contributes to the misuse. The team that actually manages and runs the forum has been absolutely silent about these for these past 2 months (which is how long this has been in place) and it is really disheartening to see literally everyone unhappy about the state of the forum. A replacement for community post approval was meant to come in at the time that community post approval was phased out, but nothing. Even more disheartening.
And if I haven’t mentioned this yet, the way the category in particular that I am talking about is misused, is that people would use it for general discussion about the parent website, whether it be rants about moderation, bandwagoning popular trends, unreasonably high amount of duplicate discussions, or just plain unnecessary discussions whose replies won’t be useful (literally we get topics like “have you memorized your user ID”, “what time of the day do you develop in”, “what year did you start developing”, etc) to anyone. I see discussion as replies replying to replies, but nowadays I see very little of that now and all the replies are replies to the OP.
Even Jeff Atwood himself says this is rare, yet on our forum we literally get dozens of “this post has been hidden by community flags and is temporarily hidden” daily. 
Must be stressing for the moderators to handle hundreds of flags even though they are paid to moderate the forum.
I might be too meta, so this might be a lot to take in. But I really want thoughts on this, I want you guys to understand it fully from a regular user in the community.
I know I am referring to only 1 category, but this specific category is the only one with the bigger problem. It happens in other categories too but at smaller scale, so it’s not a pain for moderators to deal with 
Has anyone else been in a similar situation and found a way to deal with it?
