Is it possible to limit TL0 to posting in one category?

Feature
1

I don’t know if this exists. Is there any setting where TL_0 users can be limited to only posting or replying in one category or a group of categories?

I expect the answer is to go through all my Categories and under Security trash the “everyone” group and replace it with TL_1 can post and reply and see and TL_0 can only “see”. It’d be cool to be able to do this in reverse - an admin switch “Limit TL_0 to post in [these Categories]; Limit TL_0 to reply in [these Categories]” that overrode the “everyone” designation.

Not a big deal, but let me know if there is an efficient way to do this without paging through all my existing categories.

TL;DR:

My idea is to create a “New Users - Your First Post Goes Here” category so any spam account has to put their AI book-report or attempted stealth-link to a Viagara site in one place. This category would contain our ongoing “Introduce Yourself” topic, so ideally actual new users could “check in” before being allowed to post anywhere else on the site - I could set TL_1 requirement to just one reply or post in what is basically a “sandbox” category.

We’ve been having a lot of “trash” signups which are usually spammers, but sometimes they just make an account and then never come back. Discourse is great though and we can set it to clean up users with no-posts after a time period.

We also get a lot of signups that are using AI to post. These are likely spammers a lot of the time trying to build Trust as well, but our forum also does have meaningful discussion among people programming and interested in AI/LLM capabilities. Thus we get signups who are using the forum as a test ground to “pass the Turing Test” and some who might just be trolling. We have a rule that an AI account trying to fool people that it’s real is not allowed since an AI cannot agree to the CoC and can’t be moderated.

2

I don’t think that is possible without a plugin. The requirements for TL1 are all based on reading

activity default setting
Read posts 30 tl1 requires read posts
Visit topics 5 tl1 requires topics entered
Total reading time 10 tl1 requires time spent mins

Maybe you want to keep the “see” permission for “everyone”, otherwise the category cannot be seen by visitors and crawlers.

You can use Administrative Bulk Operations to change the permissions of many categories at the same time

4 Likes
3

That’s how to do it.

2 Likes
4

Right, that’s what I would intend. TL_0 can browse and read (just as an anonymous user could), but can only reply in the sandbox category, which has the one “introduce yourself” topic which replying to would trigger them to be TL_1 (set requirement to 1 reply plus the read/visit requirements) so their first post - whether genuine, or spam, or AI would be a lot easier to notice instead of them hiding it in an obscure thread.

That does sound better - set everyone to “see” public categories then post/reply requires TL_1 except for just TL_0 can reply in the sandboxed category.