I don’t think so. That requires user participation that is approved (liked, not flagged, etc.) by the community - not something easily “bottable”. The trust system Discourse is building in resistance to such attacks.
Besides, is PM spamming an actual attack - or are you just postulating a possible attack? I hadn’t heard of this (or been the target of such) until you mention it here.
Your two statements are mutually inconsistent - which is it? Is trust context (you say ‘topic’) dependent, or is it universal?
There is a separate topic on Per-Discourse-Topic trust:
http://meta.discourse.org/t/user-trust-should-be-category-specific/5746
No (except for level 0 user features.)
Knowing supply-side economics has nothing to do with your ability to identify the hottest new Reggae bands.
Can you provide a successful example of this level of trust granted across multiple forums/communities anywhere on the internet? Perhaps then I can see what you mean by trust.
I remain confused by two seemingly contradicting things in your post:
- Fear of botting to generate trust
- Sharing trust across sites
Surely, you can see how sharing trust across sites makes easier to circumvent built-in defenses against spammers. I just create a site with this open-source software that automatically gives me trust level X and then login to the Discourse sites I want to atttack. Whamm Bamm, Here’s My Spam! Delete my account and I’ll be right back!
I looked at the post here on trust levels, and see it is quite old. @codinghorror - do you think we should put something a little more up-to-date up here on Meta? It might help with some misconceptions…