There are a bunch of newuser settings to restrict what new users can do, but this doesn’t work if new users aren’t TL0 on the forum. Our forum is extremely vulnerable to low-quality posts and young users, so the only permission TL0 has access to is to like posts and view certain categories. Only when they get promoted to TL1 are they what we would normally consider a “new user”.
It would be nice if there was a newuser trust level setting. It would default to 0, but if I set it to 1, then users at TL0 and TL1 would be treated as new users, as far as the newuser settings go.
You might could try working around with the trust level requirements in Admin > Settings > Trust Levels, or via http://example.com/admin/site_settings/category/trust (direct link).
Yes, that’s where I found the various newuser settings. Changing the requirements for TL0 to TL1 doesn’t help us because the newuser settings are restricted to TL0.
Replying specifically to the feature request, this is not likely to happen.
This is the whole point of the existing Trust Levels. We aren’t about to add another layer of Trust Levels on top. You need to incorporate your own education and the support of the community to “onboard” members. The system itself is designed to support this by limiting undesirable behaviour (such as posts with limited content, duplicates, etc.).
We would suggest you focus on building and modelling good behaviour and then giving the community the chance to take part and learn.
You can limit access to content via groups, and this has been outlined elsewhere already
I’m having trouble understanding what seems to me to be a contradiction. You have a category restricted to Trust Level 1 for members that have “learned the ropes”. But you want to give Trust Level 0 members Trust Level 1 so they can access the category even though they haven’t “learned the ropes”.
It doesn’t make any sense to me to give members Trust Level 1 and have the Trust Level 0 limits applied to Trust Level 1. Why not just keep them at Trust Level 0 until they become Trust Level 1 in due course? If you want the posts in the category to be subject to Trust Level 0 limits, why not give Trust Level 0 members access to the category?
Because they would abuse it. We have hundreds of thousands of little kids who want to post “give me free in-game credits” or “hi [well-known user]! im you’re biggest fan!”, regardless of context and whether it’s appropriate. Our compromise was that these users aren’t patient enough to stick around to meet activity requirements, so those that were mature enough to stick around got bumped up to TL1. From there, users in TL1 could learn the ropes, as they couldn’t previously when all they had access to was likes/votes.
As Robert mentioned though, we can use a group for distinguishing between impatient/learning the ropes though, so we don’t need to use another trust level in this case (unless we want to do something like give TL0 learning the ropes access to PMs or similar).