This is a followup to Limit # of posts / month - #2 by sam , in realizing that the original question had little to do with patreon and more with discourse in general.
I would like to be able to limit the # of new posts a user can make / month, based on their trust level. Are there any recommended existing plugins / features I study to get started on this?
That doesnāt seem like a good idea. If the user uses all of their monthly posts the first day, theyāll be unable to post for the rest of the month. If I couldnāt post for a month, I would not be back.
Sounds a bit like the voting plugin, where you get a limited number of votes.
Maybe this could be a category setting? Eg you canāt ask for support or post in the jobs board but you can join discussions elsewhere in the community?
Iām not a huge fan of blocking people from creating content on my site, but perhaps there are use cases where this would be important.
@pfaffman : The use case here is a paid QA/support site. The paying users likely incur a zipfās law type distribution. The goal is to prevent a few users from taking up everyoneās time.
@tobiaseigen : Yes, it would be nice to have this be category based rather than site wide.
@merefield : I believe the traditional assumption is that questions/answers make the site more valuable ā and thus encouraging questions/answers is good. However, in situations where responding to questions is (1) beneficial to the asker and (2) incurs a cost to the community/company, it may be useful to have the ability to limit the # of questions posted into certain categories per unit time.
Same but in some cases this is useful. For example, weāre thinking about creating an āAnnouncementsā sub-category. Some people in our company have shown a prepensity to spam announcements. This would damage our Discourse instance as a whole, because users would associate Discourse with spam/noise. Consequently users would be less inclined to explore the platform and find the real value.
Putting a hard limit on the Announcements sub-category of one Topic per month would be a good solution here. It would force the poster to really think āIs this actually that valuable?ā. Or even better, it would force them to create a more comprehensive/refined monthly newsletter.
@tobiaseigen Iām reviving a very old topic here 
was there ever any movement on this? Iāve seen this plugin:
But itās not quite what we are looking for.
Should such situation handle internally, not limiting software?
Itās much easier to justify a well considered technical restriction than it is to justify a retroactive judgement call.
If I moderate announcements after the fact, and the author is higher up in the company, then I get a lot of heat. This is made harder when you consider that most of our management teams are intentionally as loud as possible.
However if itās just an automatically enforced feature, which is consistent, then they are empowered to work around these restrictions and we donāt have to worry about them being too noisey/disruptive.
Like I said above, I can see the benefit of a category setting limiting the number of topics a user is allowed to post in a category in a given time period. But there is no such setting currently, and I am not aware of any other customers requesting it or having rule of three.
Have you tried the āslow modeā category setting? Iāve not used it but it seems to be what you are looking for? You could set it to 30 days, so users are only allowed to post in the category once every 30 days. Though it appears to not slow down the starting new topics in the category, only replies. You can also auto-close topics so there are no replies permitted at all.
More about slow mode:
We used to have a forum that used a formula based on the number of posts and their length, over the last 24 hours. So someone could make, for example, a half dozen short posts or two long ones. It tended to help reduce overquoting and it also cut into the A-B-A-B-A-B-A-B threads where neither party was willing to let the other person have the last word. The way it was implemented was to adjust the flood time per user.
If having a rule will solve the problem then tell the people to follow the rule. This is a problem with people who want to behave badly. Itās hard to imagine that āwell, the computer wonāt let your post go throughā is going to be a solution.
But if youāre self hosted and want a plugin to do this, post in marketplace or contact me.
These are all very thoughtful replies 
I think the second part of this is the significant part. Iāll play with it later in the week, but Iām also pretty sure this is only for replies rather than creating new topics.
Was this in Discourse? Was it a site wide restriction or Category specifc?
The problem is that this requires resources to enforce it. At our org itās resource intensive each time that happens. The conversation looks like this:
Either way, I end up having a bunch of meetings where I need to perfectly justify this design decision to the type of people I illustrated above. They do not care at all about the impact on the user, so long as their voices are the loudest.
Sadly not, weāre enterprise customers.
Iām thinking, maaaybe lean on this:
That means posts in that category need manual approval, and if I make it that only admins and global moderators can approve these topics we are at least a little further ahead of the problem.
One step further would be to
They could get around this by simply getting someone else to post the topic on their behalf, but that step of resistance at least encourages some degree of internal moderation between that group ā āHey, do we really need to send this? I have other stuff to doā¦ā
This is the problem. Technology canāt fix that.
This is your best bet. And donāt do any fancy automatic approval stuff. You log in every day.
And if they post too many then wait until the next meeting and ask everyone if this is so important that the rules need to be violated. Or if they wonāt have any posts next month.
Obviously, I work alone.
Iām not sure the Slow Mode category setting will help here. Itās for adding slow mode automatically to all new topics created in that category. It definitely doesnāt restrict how many new topics someone can create in the category, but it also has no direct effect on how many times someone can post in a category either (ie. Itās not a slow mode for the category itself, but one per topic).
Having a rate limit/restriction is an interesting idea. Though I think the Announcement situation is going to cause you grief no matter what as I can imagine itās the āI want to say this and youāre not letting meā friction whatever shape it takes thatās going to keep landing you in those meetings. 
The marketplace use case is an interesting one though.
This was in an old version of phpbb a number of years ago. It was site-wide, what was done was that code was added to the flood time check to adjust the flood time based on the number and length of posts made by that user in the last 24 hours. (The rejection message was also modified.)
IMHO, a posting limit that is reset after 24 hours is something our users paid more attention to than a ban for multiple days, weeks or months. But that may not be true for every type of online community.
I havenāt checked to see how flood time works in Discourse, a similar tool might be possible.
Hello, maybe Iāll be the third if I support the idea of āālimiting the number of posts (in my case, I would like to limit not only topics but also messages (replies)) and the length of posts in a certain category per user
You noted correctly, this idea has the right to life
My takeaway from this conversation is that setting community rules/norms and enforcing them is part of the day to day job of site moderators and only in extreme cases needs to be enforced through the discourse software itself. Slowing down replies is such an extreme case because it helps foster more thoughtful discussion, and gives breathing room to allow more people to join in. I think most communities that use it actually only use it via the topic admin wrench in specific topics that need it. I suspect not many even use the category slow mode setting, and I havenāt heard about it being used to limit the number of announcements being posted to e.g. one per month per user.
Preventing users from posting new topics too often should be enforceable by moderators along with other rules e.g. what topics to allow in each category, etc. Iām sorry @tris20 that you struggle with this in your community! 
Such enforcement could be added to Discourse but I donāt think itās likely to be prioritized unless an enterprise customer sponsors it or several enterprise customers request it. You could also post to marketplace to get it through a plugin. Then if enough sites adopt it then it might eventually make it into core.
Itās already possible to limit replies using the category slow mode setting.
This is new to this topic. What problem are you seeking to solve by limiting the length of posts just in specific categories? There is the max post length admin setting but that affects all posts on the site.
I think thereās less value in limiting the length of individual posts than in limiting the cumulative length of posts over some reasonable time period.
But there might be a use case for a category-specific post size limit rather than a site-wide one.
Sorry for the long response, I didnāt notice the notification 
I think the introduction of AI in discourse is a game changer. On my instance of the forum, I use AI plugins, thanks to which a zone (category) of communication between people and people with AI appears on the forum. As we know, unlike people, communication with AI is paid and uncontrolled communication between people and AI can cost site administrators a lot of money. Existing AI plugins do not provide the ability to fine-tune the characters entered and the number of requests. In this connection, I think itās time to add the max post length function to the ability to select categories, user groups, and even the ability to configure maximum characters for personal messages. Since most users prefer to communicate with AI in private messages.
I think what you might want (until your feature request becomes a reality) is a plugin that would limit the number of posts in a category by some counter, perhaps by removing the user from the group required for posting after that counter gets to zero. Then the user could, say, pay for access to the group and counter number of posts (or wait until the end of them month when everyoneās counter got reset?) . When the user posted in that category the counter would be reduced.
The automation plugin could help, but I donāt think itās got means to manage a counter.
