On Mon, 2020-04-13 at 19:56 +0100, Neil McGovern wrote: > Instead of explaining it here, please have a > read of the following: > https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/ > The short version is that the more a particular account interacts with > the community in a positive way, the more trust the system has about > them, and the more privileges they are afforded to assist in > moderation.
I think some features of Discourse can be useful, for example moving messages to new topic, simple polls (I don't like "like" buttons...), or even editing messages to make the wording clearer instead of sending further follow-up messages. Trying to experiment with Discourse for this seems useful to me. The "trust levels" though are one of the features that I don't like: in particular "Trust Level 3 - Regular" mostly requires to constantly visit the site every day (or every other day), read x% of all posts and topics (even though they might not be relevant to your interest or in a foreign language you don't speak), ... to not get demoted again. It feels more like a customer loyality program to try to bind users to the Discourse service, like rewards for daily visits in mobile games, not anything that implies trust to somehow govern the system. The system also requires tracking active read time and such; I don't really like a system doing that... The notifications to welcome new people or that the system hasn't seem someone for some time[1] also seem designed to manipulate people into spending more time on the system. Such psychological tricks are something I would more expect from Facebook than Debian :-/ [1]: https://discourse.debian.net/t/likes-per-post-ratio/152/2 The claim of Discourse having an excellent email interface also feels exagerrated: unless I missed something[2] it seems very basic. One can send and receive messages, but quoting in replies already doesn't work as usual and any additional functionality isn't exposed at all as far as I can tell. That said I'm in principle fine with trying a mostly web-only system; just like GitLab also really needs to be used over the web. [2]: I couldn't really find much Discourse documentation, even less than for other things in Debian people say are underdocumented. > Instead, it encourages community members to flag posts. If a post receives > sufficient flags, it is then automatically hidden. Users may chose to > "unhide" the post for themseleves if they wish to view it. > > These are then sent to the moderating team to agree, disagree or > ignore the flag. What decides who is in the moderation team? That seems to be something different from the trust levels? I would also expect Discourse to have some way to entirely remove messages, or at least remove the original content fully and replace it with a notice that the message was removed; who can do that? Also the moderation team? Ansgar
