To encourage kindness towards users who are posting for the first time or may not have posted in a while we’ve created a new feature that calls special attention to these new/returning users.
These banners are visible to other users, but not the poster they apply to… and by default are only visible to community members who have been active enough to achieve Trust Level 2.
Admins can adjust these options in their site settings
new user notice tl This controls the trust level of who can see the new user notice, the default is TL2.
returning user notice tl This controls the trust level of who can see the returning user notice, the default is TL2.
returning users days This controls when a user is considered to be a returning user, the default is 120 days.
old post notice days This controls when we remove the background color and deemphasize the notice, the default is 14 days.
If you’d like to change the text of these notices you can do so under admin > customize > text content (Search for post.notice).
How do I disable this feature?
You can either raise the trust level to Trust Level 4 (TL4 is only awarded manually). Or you can add CSS to hide these banners under admin > customize > themes
This CSS will hide both types
.post-notice {
display: none;
}
or optionally you can hide individual types of notices:
This is a great feature, but it’d be even better if we could not have these notices show up on certain topics. We have an introduce yourself topic and the first time poster notice adds a lot of noise.
This is fantastic! After this feature was implemented, it sure did encourage our members to start welcoming new users! This helps our new users be encouraged to keep chatting! I’ve probably seen no new users not being welcomed, which is great! Great job Team Discourse!
Just a heads up: some languages (e.g. romanian) doesn’t have a generic pronoun (like their), therefore you’re stuck with using a translation of either he or she.
Maybe this functionality need to be disabled by default on non-english forums?
I think at this point most people making that argument in regard to English are doing so in bad faith.
This is a problem that has been discussed a bit more in other topics, including Gender and translations — Is it correct to say that Slavic languages fall into similar issues as other languages discussed where gender is often built-in to the language?
I’m on your side. I’m not convinced that it’s bad faith, though.
Admittedly, I am an Old White Guy, but I’m pretty far ahead of lots of Old White Guys on such issues. It wasn’t that long ago that I assiduously he/shed and/or (s)hed my way through a bunch of academic writing and the singular they wasn’t in the stuff I was reading a mere ten years ago, even by feminists who wouldn’t capitalize their names.
While those other Old White Guys are wrong, I’m not convinced that it’s bad faith. Oh, but you said most. So you’re right.
Oh absolutely, I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t. I was trying to express that it’s a solved issue not really worth discussing with English, but there are a bunch of complexities with other languages where nouns and verb tenses carry gender so swapping in a single word isn’t always possible.
In many languages, gender isn’t so tightly linked to sex as it is in English. In French, for example, if you refer to a man as “une personne,” you use the feminine gender as long as “personne” is the focus. To return to referring to him as “il,” you have to use some masculine noun. It is not the person’s sex that determines, but the word’s gender. As Saki puts in the mouth of one of his characters, “French is a most dreadfully unsexing language!”
Indeed, slavic languagages have that (and many other problems) as well.
Also, In Czech we have 7 declension types which makes software translations (with variables in particular) challenging, to say the least.
Romans with their five declensions had it much easier:
and add one class per tag in the topic view (everywhere we show the 
