Trust level multiplier for max edits per day?

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What would people think of trust level multiplier for max_edits_per_day?

I looked for a rationale for the setting, and I see that it was 20 when Discourse was released, and then increased to 30 the next, day, but without any rationale for either value, and my searches for a specific rationale came up cold.

At forum.makerforums.info we have a helpfully prolific TL3 user who is trying to help us get a lot of his posts recategorized into a new category; he ran into this limit fairly quickly while doing this work. I substantially increased max_edits_per_day to deal with this (probably) one-time problem for us. But the first thing I looked for was a trust level multiplier for this setting because it seemed natural to me to increase a rate limit for a more trusted user.

Alternatively, is there some rationale for admins to consider for an appropriate setting for max_edits_per_day across all trust levels?

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A trust level multiplier has been suggested before but I doubt that it will get any traction without reported problems from several forums.

The logic for such decision-making was expressed when discussing the raising of flag limits years ago. But even that issue has only come up a couple of times in this forum:

So the solution to temporarily raise the limits for any of these max limits is reasonable because:

  • these limits are not reported as being hit very often
  • potential issues with moderation or security are also not being reported
  • even if the the limits are being hit a lot, admins are either living with the limits or increasing them without reporting here
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Huh. The generic, universal multipliers seem like such an obvious idea…

I guess we’ll just increase more limits and live with the noise from people who are still figuring out how to use discourse. :roll_eyes: Thanks for linking in that post; I missed that discussion when searching before. Didn’t mean to beat a dead horse!

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A rationale for the max edit setting, I guess, is to limit the worst-case opportunity for one bad user (e.g. a hacked account) to wreak havoc and make work for moderators to repair. So set it according to how much work you’re prepared to fix, e.g. would you be happy to delete or edit X posts to remove X spam hyperlinks.

I think that the multiplier idea is logical and it is not a completely dead horse but it needs a better rationale than:

  • enabling infrequent reviews of many topics/posts on a small number of forums.
  • the conceptual simplicity of the trust levels matching the multiples, i.e 1x, 2x, 3x and 4x.
    But that default would probably only be 40 max edits or less. Probably not an answer to your issue.

Plus if multipliers were added then people would want to set them for their sites. For little benefit we would then have more noise in this forum, more settings for admins to review, potentually more spammers doing more damage, etc.

I admire the Discourse team for sticking to more important priorities than introducing complexity that won’t benefit the majority of forums, e.g. per-user permissions/ACLs (access control lists).

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