Maximum topics in first day error, 4 days after first topic

Contribute Bug

AI-generated summary

The discussion addresses a bug where users with existing topics (created 4 days ago) are incorrectly blocked from creating new topics due to the ‘max topics in first day’ setting. markersocial notes that the setting should only apply to the 24-hour period after a user’s first post, not to all TL0 users. simon confirms the code incorrectly checks for TL0 status instead of the user’s first 24 hours. markersocial suggests renaming the settings and updating error messages for clarity. Ed_S points out a discrepancy in the code logic. martin resolves the issue with a fix that restores the intended behavior, ensuring TL0 users are only treated as ‘new’ during their first 24 hours.

1

The error mesage was:

You’ve reached the maximum number of topics a new user can create on their first day. Please wait 2 hours before typing again.

This seems to be controlled by: ‘max topics in first day’ - adjusting this removed the error.

The issue is, that the user has 8 previous Topics with the first being 4 days ago. So I think they shouldn’t be affected by this setting, seeing it is meant to only affect the 24hr period after the user’s first post. The posting account is a TL0 user.

Option description is:

The maximum number of topics a user is allowed to create in the 24 hour period after creating their first post

I’d make a speculative guess that the setting might really be ‘maximum posts per day for TL0 users’.

It may be worth checking if this is also the case for the ‘max replies in first day’ setting.

2

Yes, the code seems to be checking to see if a user is TL0 - not checking that it’s the user’s first 24 hours on the site. If that’s the case, possibly the message that is displayed to the user should be changed. The default requirements for achieving TL1 are fairly low though. I’d expect that considering TL0 users to be new users is correct for most cases.

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3

@simon Yeah, I’m experimenting with adjusting the difficulty for users to achieve TL1+.

If the functionality of these settings are kept the same (and assuming it is the same case for max replies in first day), I think it could be good to rename them to be consistent with the other ‘newuser’ settings. As well as update the message to users as you mentioned and the setting descriptions.

E.g.
max topics in first day → newuser max topics per day
max replies in first day → newuser max replies per day

4

Is this still not as it should be? This code
looks wrong to me, checking if the user’s first post is more than a day old?

 def new_user_posting_on_first_day?
    !staff? && trust_level < TrustLevel[2] &&
      (
        trust_level == TrustLevel[0] || self.first_post_created_at.nil? ||
          self.first_post_created_at >= 24.hours.ago
      )
  end
7

Okay it was a little tricky to untangle, but I think this will correct the issue:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/33303

Basically we changed the intent of new_user_posting_on_first_day? years ago so it didn’t match the description and the errors. This restores the old behaviour and doesn’t treat TL0 users as new users at all times for the purposes of this check.

3 Likes
Locking at Trust Level 0