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.
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.
Hello, I hope you don’t mind me bumping this old thread, but things have changed since then. There are now three conditions to go from TL0 to TL1: the number of posts you’ve participated in, the number of post views, and the time spent.
My question is: are these conditions combined with AND or OR?
And if it’s OR, what do we do if we don’t want post views and time spent to count toward moving from TL0 to TL1? Do we set extremely high values?
The forum in general has had a bit of a change of heart about bumping old topics. Good practice for institutional knowledge retention and ease of search-ability of that knowledge base has leaned toward reducing redundancy. As such, your post is directly related to the original topic and kudos for finding this topic.
Indeed they have and the idea of sand-boxing new users in a certain category(s) might be useful.
I believe AND (caveat: I don’t know)
in other words, all conditions would have to be met. I am guessing however and others correct me if I am in error
this question I can only answer by guessing you have administrative rights on the forum in question. The trust levels and the requirements can be tweaked ad nauseam with administrative access to the setting
I think maybe you are right because there used to be an indicator, a link to a getting started page or something that is now gone from my site as far as I can tell. I will edit my post to remove this inaccurate information
OK, so what does the “TL1 requires topic entered” option mean, with the tooltip “How many topics a new user must have participated in to be promoted to Trust Level 1”?
What is meant by “participated”?
Is this a translation error (I have the interface in French).
I think it’s a translation error. Have you tried reading the English original?
You can also check the French descriptions of the site settings at /admin/site_settings/category/all_results?filter=tl1%20requires. Those are not translated by ai as the posts here on Meta (although that’s no guarantee that they’re more accurate - feel free to let me know if they are not, so I can add a comment on the translation platform for someone to improve them).
In this case, the AI translation here is better than the one in the TL1 admin section.
Because “participate” doesn’t just mean opening a topic; it means contributing to it, i.e., posting something.
The question for me remains how to ensure that a TL0 member can only browse the forum in read-only mode (like a non-member) and can only create a topic in a single sub-category called “Introduction”.
I thought that was the original question. And I’m still a bit in the dark.
The “Security” tab is hidden by default; use the “advanced settings” toggle at the top to find it. Apart from that recent change in the interface, the documentation topic is very helpful: Understanding groups and category permissions
In all categories configured like the example above, visitors and users with TL0 can only read, but not post. To allow posting in the introduction topic, you need a category where TL0 users are allowed to post. I think it’s best not to allow other users to create new topics in there, since TL0 users would be allowed to post in those too.
So in this category, you allow replying for trust_level_0, but do not allow creating topics.
I’m just a little unsure if that’s really what you want to achieve. After all, users can reach TL1 just by reading, and then post in all categories. So there’s still no requirement to introduce yourself first.
The question remains: how do I promote a new TL0 member to TL1 once they’ve posted their first topic (their introduction) in the only category where they have permission to do so?
To clarify: yes, “open” is much more explicit than “participate” in this case, but it remains ambiguous.
Because in French, I can “open” a topic to read it, but also to create it.
For this case, I would translate “enter” as “access,” which implies reading rather than creation.
So, “TL1 requires topics entered” becomes “Accessed topics required for TL1.”
And similarly in the legend: “How many topics must a new user have accessed to be promoted to Trust Level 1.”
I know that translation is sometimes a difficult exercise. As someone who translates websites and other documents myself, my best contribution to Free Software is helping users on forums (especially Discourse) where I have the necessary skills.
