# Is auto-promoting TL3s a sensible choice? **URL:** \ **Category:** Community Building\ **Tags:** trust-levels\ **Created:** [April 16, 2023, 9:03am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-auto-promoting-tl3s-a-sensible-choice/262652 "2023-04-16T09:03:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 19
**Author:** ![Crius](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/crius/32/317214_2.png) [@Crius](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Crius)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2023, 7:17am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-auto-promoting-tl3s-a-sensible-choice/262652/19 "2023-05-03T07:17:14Z")
> [@pfaffman](#): > > Right. So change the defaults if they don’t work for your community. Jay sometimes I feel like you skim read. It’s not a problem of defaults or not. It’s a problem of missing options. The point is, raising “but in meta doesn’t happen” it’s a moot point. It’s like saying “but I’ve never seen a cow in my life”. Sure, doesn’t mean they don’t exists. The answers to raised issues in terms of lacking options or opinionated choices in how the options are provided tend to be met with “it’s by design” so one simply go and make its own modifications which of course takes time (people need to learn how discourse "vanilla works before being able to know what/how to change it) and contribute to creating the equivalent of the dependency hell of many languages in which there are _N_ discourse installations but multiplied by _M_ plugins configurations which makes harder overall to provide help even just in the community. > [@Lhc\_fl](#): > > Your forum has 80k+ users, but only 10 TL3s. Let’s say 100% of TL3s are bad guys (oh my god, that’s a disaster). You also only need to deal with 10 saboteurs. I’m tempted to ignore the message because I’m tired of the constant “poking” like the part in parenthesis but just for the sake of “discussion” I’ll tell you what is the problem that clearly is escaping you at this time. TL3 are automatically assigned over time. Let’s go along for an hypothetical ok? - It will take a couple days to create a bot with puppeteerJS that farm a user account (reading time, reactions, etc) and sooner or later (depending on how you increase the requirements) you’ll have some accounts that reach TL3 (source: years of experience in web development) - Let’s say instead that a troublesome user just participate and is often suspended, silenced, TL0’ed but simply, **really simply** just create a new account and start all over again (source: direct experience) > [@Lhc\_fl](#): > > should be the moderator’s job to deal with Moderators will deal with him (or it, if it’s a bot enhanced account that is smart and stay low) but over and over and over, it will be tiring and expensive in terms of time spent trying to protect the community. It’s not a job. Moderators, unless you are talking as if discourse is used only by companies and moderators are only employees, are not paid personnel. They have to deal with the worst side of the community and do it for free. If you write something like that above, you either have never been a moderator and/or have never been in a community that has some serious traffic. The title of this split is probably misleading (not intentionally) as the discussion was born while discussing another topic and this was a secondary topic that came out of it. The overall discussion is more about how the “positive” philosophy behind Discourse is often not accounting for real world scenarios in which it doesn’t even offer an option to deal with. Which is not the case for the TL3 actions as you can hunt for what a TL3 does in the settings and change it, but there are things you just cannot prevent. I’ll just disable notification here now, because I feel that the topic has lost it’s original focus and we are just talking about something else entirely. --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-auto-promoting-tl3s-a-sensible-choice/262652)._