Trust Level 0 as a way of "punishment" lead to unexpected results

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First of all, I am not sure this is the right category so, forgive me and if it’s not, move to the right one at your discretion.

As a way to have a “warning” phase of sort to some problematic users, we opted to try and lock three of them to Trust Level 0 for a month instead of straight out silencing or banning them.

The reasoning behind it was that, as we intended it, they would be limited in forum functions (no pm for example) and in the amount of Replies/Topic they can open per day.

This last part is what caused the unexpected behaviour because according to 2 of them, the TL0 actually let them create 10 more replies (which included responding to PM sent by other users) and that’s it. Our understanding was that this limitation was per day, not “forever”.

Can someone with a little more knowledge of the inner working of Discourse (code-wise) give a look at it and confirm that there isn’t anything weird going on? Or have we just misunderstood and that’s how it’s intended to work?

I’m going to create a new user now in our community and test this empirically as well.
I created a topic here first of all because I am literally in the middle of an house move and I would otherwise forget to do it amid all the chaos of the next few days.

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I look forward to reading the answer. I use TL0 similarly, not as a punishment, but as an equivalent to setting the Mailman 2 moderation bit.

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I don’t know how “upping” a thread is seen here (generally not a good thing) but it’s my first offense if that’s the case :stuck_out_tongue:

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Did you try impersonating them and try by yourself after checking their activity?

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The description doesn’t explicitly set the limit “per day”, but rather “in the 24 hours period after creating their first post”. It may be ambiguous, but my English being what it is… :thinking:

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Yeah, I’ve run into this as well… and come to the conclusion that TL0 just doesn’t work for this. Instead I will sometimes carefully craft some targeted watched words to require approval (or temporarily silence/suspend). I do wish you could individually flag a given account to require approvals independently of TL — I thought that was possible at one time but I can’t find it now.

I used to have a better understanding of this, but my posts about it have all been deleted so :man_shrugging: . I suspect this misunderstanding stems from the Understanding Discourse Trust Levels post — it’d be great if it could get clarified there.

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I’d really like to see someone from the developers chime in because, no matter the use we were making of it, it’s kind of a bug that a user is locked to “just that amount” no matter a daily reset.

Considering that the threshold to get promoted are editable, it would means that there are scenario in which user that are not much active would end up with an unusable account after enough time has passed.

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Just to note, I don’t think this is the usual behaviour. Locking someone to TL0 does not restrict the total amount of posts they can make in total.

FWIW, I can’t replicate this. :person_shrugging:

(And the First Day limits only apply to TL0 and TL1 users for the 24 hours following their first post)

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This is weird because I had 3 users going through this.

I’ll need to test by creating a new user and trying myself.

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