Just another one of my "thinking out loud"s.
I finally had a closer look at the TL3 requirements on my forum today. It was immediately obvious that the default settings were too high for our moderate level of activity. The default is probably as good as it can be. Problem is there’s such a huge variance in forum activity (beyond just volume) that the default will only be right for the most average forums, which isn’t the majority.
Solution: Model TL3 after your top contributing users
Let’s say I have a new forum with 1000 users. After a couple months, I should be able to identify 10 users whom I consider model citizens in my little community. I want to grab averages from these users to set the bar for my forum.
- Add them to a special “Model Citizens” group
- Go to forum.example.com/model-citizens (admin only) to see these user’s average read count, like count etc.
- Apply to TL3 settings.
You could come back to this page every so often and re-check it. Look for changing trends, model citizens gone inactive etc.