So I frequent several Discourse sites and being an admin at one make full use of what I can do.
Just recently I joined another site and was replying to help a new user there. No I did not do the intro, no I did not read any post, etc. I just saw a recent post that I could help answer.
So being a new user there was subjected to all of the limits for a new user. In trying to help answer I must have been flagged several times for using to many links, trying to post more than two replies to the same topic and having my really nice answer flagged and hidden. Needless to say the user I was trying to help never did see the nice reply.
While I know this will never happen, I just have to ask.
Can admins of current Discourse sites be given a secret means to promote them out of the trust level basement.
That’s called “security by obscurity”. It’s a bad idea. As soon as the spammers get the “secrety handshake” they can spam every Discourse site in the world.
You’ll need to get to TL2 by traditional means or ask the admin for a bump.
I did the view several post over several minutes to get to TL 1 and was finally able to get my reply posted.
Now I know why some of the new users appreciate it when I promote them to TL 3 on the site I am admin if they manage to post one topic that sounds like they have more than a year or two of using Prolog.
Being stuck in TL 0 is worse than being silenced. I’ll have to remember that one.
Err, no? It only takes like, 10 minutes to get to TL1 with standard Discourse defaults. Being silenced you can’t post at all, so I don’t know how TL0 would be worse.
If you want to be trusted by a community before jumping through all the hoops they have set up, consider reaching out to their staff to request it.
It gives me thoughts on for ways to identify or verify yourself between communities, but maybe you can get their attention without it.
Any technology-based Konami code to sidestep trust levels makes it easy to bypass the purpose of trust levels, but in turn they’re no substitute for establishing trust directly.
When you are silenced you know you can not post anything, when you are at stuck at TL0 and you keep running into the limits, like only 2 replies per topic, only 2 links pert post, etc. It becomes very frustrating very fast. I would take a few minutes to write a nice post with links and doing research along the way with references, and then when I click on Reply I am notified by the system what is wrong. Then trying to fix the post becomes a pain because some of it has to go. Then when you get the third reply all done, it won’t let you post it. So the reason I see this being worse is that it you spend a significant more amount of time trying to get a reply done, while if you were silenced you would not even spend the time.
It reminded me of the old days of programming where you would write your code with punch cards then load them into the hopper. The next day you would get in line to pick up the printed output (Green Bar) and hope you made no mistakes.
Make sense.
Perhaps what would be nice when creating a first post is a popup that tells you what your limits are and gives a nice suggestion on how to get to TL1. Also it would be nice if there were something showing ones progress towards TL1 so you know if it will take you just 5 minutes or 30 minutes. I do understand the need for the low limits to filter out spammers and such.
Anyway as I noted, I just took several minutes to read several different topics to get promoted to TL1 on that site. That is what I usually do on the other new sites I visit, but in this case I just started with a reply not doing the other things.
Yes after the first flagged post I did use the @ for staff, but as it was late I don’t think any of them were online.
I would welcome such a means but I don’t see it as a high priority until this starts to become a regular reoccurring problem. While I don’t know the official count of Discourse sites active, I am not surprised when I hear a number like 10,000. Personally I am aware of about 200-300 and a user of about 10 now.
The way I think of it there are two parts: trust and skill (ability) level
I don’t have a better answer on how the two could be separated, but the idea of a central repository, as you elude too, that holds the skill and trust levels at other sites would be one possible way. Anyway this is all just a philosophy discussion for now.
I don’t know if it can be the core feature, but it can be an awesome plugin for every Discourse instance which want to connect together. Build a trusted third-party service for auth problem is the key.
Well, as others have noted, the TL0 (new user) sandbox is indeed fairly restrictive but pretty easy to graduate from.
The only “magic handshake” for TL2 is continued participation, or contact the mods via the /about page and ask them, if you know them, for a manual promotion.
