Users discuss implementing a feature in Discourse that restricts access to categories or posts until a new user interacts with a specific topic—such as by liking it—to signify agreement with community rules. sunjam proposes this as a clever way to ensure users read rules before accessing content, suggesting it could be tied to group membership or badge earning (e.g., “First Run Wizard”). awesomerobot notes this pattern is common on Discord and suggests leveraging existing Trust Level (TL) settings—like requiring a certain number of likes, posts read, or time spent—to gate access. For example, restricting all content except a “rules topic” to TL1, and requiring users to read 10 posts and spend 3 minutes to advance. Alternatively, shifting TL requirements to make agreement trigger TL2. Jagster raises SEO concerns, noting that hiding content until agreement may prevent Googlebot indexing, which awesomerobot confirms. sunjam revisits the idea of requiring the “First Run Wizard” badge as a potential solution. The thread explores workarounds using current Discourse mechanics rather than new features, balancing user onboarding with discoverability and SEO impact.
Until the user visited a specific topic and “liked it” they could not access any other posts or categories or content. A message was visible:
Welcome, you must read and agree to our rules. Please do so.
The only topics a new user could see were
FAQ
Rules topic
At the end of the rules topic it explained: Thank you for reading. By liking this topic you are accepting our terms of service and we welcome you to access the full community. Please click "Like" to accept.
I found this idea very cleaver and am considering how to use this concept in Discourse. I’m thinking it should be similar to restrict by group, but unsure of how “gain access by clicking like” would work.
Perhaps the same could be accomplished by joining a particular group… I Agree to the Rules group
or
Require the First Run Wizard badge be earned by all users in Trust Level 0
A lot of Discord servers use that pattern, and it seems like it’s born out of forcing all custom features through chat bots?
In Discourse this would be really easy if we had a tl1 requires likes given setting (we have it for trust level 2). You could restrict all categories other than a “rules category” with a single “rules topic” to TL1… and to gain access to TL1 and all other categories users would have to like the rules topic.
Maybe you can shift all your trust level settings to make this workable so everyone who agreed is trust level 2 (using tl2 requires likes given)?
Without a new setting or more dramatic trust level setting changes, you could also use existing trust level settings to do this based on time rather than an explicit button click. You could have 1 category and topic available to tl0, and you could change these settings:
tl1 requires topics entered: 1 tl1 requires read posts: 10 (maybe you have 10 rules split out across 10 posts) tl1 requires time spent mins 3 (to force people to spend more than 0 time reading)
So then if someone read all 10 posts in your rules topic and spent a few minutes there, they’d gain access to everything else.
Will that stop googlebot too? If yes, it can give negative boost to SEO, but if that’s not important then trick like that can help to clean up just curious ones.