Trust levels is one the best features of Discourse. But I have noticed that members don’t know anything about trust levels other than getting badges. Can something be done to achieve more visibility towards Trust levels.
Actually, my plan is to motivate my members to head towards Trust level 3 but it’s already difficult to explain them what is Trust Level.
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It would be great to have a dedicated page which shows the “journey” within all 4 trust levels with 4 columns.
The current trust level column should be highlighted with black text color while the others have grey text color.
The next higher column could display which and how many of each action the user has to reach to get promoted.
In each column the “features” for each tl could be listed.
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Not an expert here, but I’m pretty sure this is directly contrary to the purpose of the trust levels–they’re intended to arise naturally from a user interacting with the community, not to be something that you can game.
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But the thing is that we need some gaming element also to motivate users to increase activity in the community. Although, I am also understanding your point of view but still explaining the Trust Levels is still needed according to me.
Badges seems a good way to do this, isn’t that enough? If you can get to have badges progress bars, that could do the trick right, instead of using trust levels which implies one’s more responsibility?
Progress toward badges would, I guess, naturally leads toward trust.
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Yeah badges is definitely a thing which I am using and I am also using groups in a way to gamify discourse as well.
But the point still remains that, there is no explanation for trust levels in discourse communities. Right now just the moderators know what trust levels is and no one else does. I need a way that people would get to know more about trust levels and in a proper way.
Just being curious since I can’t help you with that you’re specifically asking (“how to learn users about trust levels and encourage them to increases theirs”), what makes you think they should know more about trust levels at other times than when info about trust level naturally comes up?
For example: If a new user try to post too many links, Discourse will let them know (I hope, at least!). If a user gains a trust level, Discourse will let them know. And so on.
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Well there are dedicated pages explaining About Us, TOS, Privacy Policy and even a complete tutorial with @discobot. Then why not anything about Trust Levels? I am not saying to tell them exactly how to achieve the higher levels but if they won’t even know that with trust levels they can gain more privileges then they won’t even try. The more reason we can give people to increase their activity in the community the Better.
Good plan!
My hope is to: make a topic on what they are as I change the defaults to stop trust level farming. I write out what each trust level can do (privileges and limitations) I then explain what each one earns and how to get it and leave topic open for questions… But I haven’t done that yet. maybe this can help you?
Also, we already have a blog post that does a lot of the explaining:
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I know that there’s a blog post which tells about the Trust Levels. But we would really like to tell our members about Trust Levels from our website rather than sending them to Discourse Blog.
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Yep, that is useful @thegurjyot but if like me you changed the defaults. 
@thegurjyot if you don’t want to send them somewhere else do this.
How it would be if Discourse has a Badges menu that has a appearence like this? It could has progress bars for badges.
This is from a player profile of Battlefield 3 game
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Yes I have changed a lot of things but haven’t changed the basic working of Discourse and I haven’t touched TL settings at all. Although, I would seriously like to have everything available on my website so that the members won’t have to go to other websites at all.
Now, I am also thinking about making a post for this but I also wanted to know how other people are coping with this. Or if anyone has a better idea for implementing this.
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I have an area where announcements and related go, coincidentally just yesterday I put up a trust level bump thread, though its easy to assume everyone understands how things work I actually had a two year member reply they didn’t know about it 
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I think a topic with the journey is a good way to do that, better if the topic is in the welcome message by system or discobot. I’m planning to do that.
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Copy and paste?
Users get a congratulatory pm on attaining trust levels 1 and 2.
The welcome pm all users get after signup (with a forced click screen highlighting the user drop down) links to the trust blog entry.
Remember users will never read anything you put on the screen 
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Even as an administrator, I find it rather opaque what the privileges and requirements are for each trust level… and I’m able to cross reference the above blog post against our site settings!
I would very much value having a page — on our site itself — that is essentially that blog post but up-to-date and dynamically generated using our customized settings.
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I am having the same issue in my community. Since we have custom restrictions for tl0 to tl2, an automatically generated page in the “trust level promotion journey” would be huge help
Also helpful would be some visual hints within the user menu top right which indicate the current level. for example the current trust level badge could be displayed right next to the username. There is currently plenty of space there.
Thoughts?
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