1301894 - Tweak the thresholds for "Regular" trust level to more practical levels

Status: ASSIGNED

(Infrastructure & Operations :: Community IT: Discourse, task)

Description

[Akshay S Dinesh]

The "Regular" trust levels are by default the following:

* must have visited at least 50% of days
* must have replied to at least 10 different topics
* of topics created in the last 100 days, must have viewed 25% (capped at 500)
* of posts created in the last 100 days, must have read 25% (capped at 20k)
* must have received 20 likes, and given 30 likes.*
* must not have received more than 5 spam or offensive flags (with unique posts and unique users for each, confirmed by a moderator)
* must not have been suspended

Source: https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-do-user-trust-levels-do/4924/6?u=asd

I don't know if these thresholds have been changed from the default values. Anyhow, I had attained the Regular trust level a few months back. But, this trust level can be lost if we dip below the threshold. And I did lose the level later.

Now, I am going to argue that this thresholds need tweaking for our discourse.

In the past, our discourse contained mostly only those categories that every Mozillian would/should be interested in. When that was true, it was easy for someone to view more than 25% of all topics created and read 25% of all posts. (And I think that's when I received the Regular badge too).

But, later, there were categories added to our discourse which wouldn't be interesting to all Mozillians. For example, there's the Add-on support category, addons.mozilla.org category, etc. These categories see a lot of activity which are at the same time irrelevant for a regular Mozillian. (Checkout https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/latest and at the time of writing, of the 10 topics with the latest activity 4 are about add-ons). With the influx of such topics, it naturally became difficult for me (or any other "regular") to satisfy the thresholds for regular trust level.

I suggest that we decrease the threshold for leader_requires_topics_viewed and leader_requires_posts_read to less than 10% to allow for more regulars to become regulars. To compensate, you could consider increasing leader_requires_days_visited and leader_requires_topics_replied_to, if you think that's required.

But, basically, it's very sad that I can't "recategorize and rename topics" or "make my own posts wiki (that is, editable by any TL1+ users)" while I feel like I could use those powers every other day.

Comment 1

[Majken Connor [:Kensie]]

Hi Akshay,

Thanks for raising this, these are all very interesting points. I would also say this is a very good example of stating the solution before the problem and why it should be done the other way around.

Let's focus on the problems, so we can evaluate the possible solutions. Your solution might be the right one, but it also could be that there's a solution that you would be even happier with than this first suggestion.

1. "make my own posts wiki"

This is very understandable, and I don't see that someone should need to be a regular to do this. It's actually editable which trust level can perform this action, so for possible solutions we have:

- Make level 3 easier to reach
- Don't require level 3

2. "recategorize and rename topics"

This one we want to be more careful on. This doesn't seem to be to recategorize and rename your own topics. If that were the case, I think we'd be fine bumping the trust level down on this one as well. But if it's the case that this grants the ability to recategorize or rename *all* posts, then this is more traditionally a moderator function, and in my opinion this shouldn't be as easily accessible as making wiki posts. I don't see an individual switch to adjust the trust level for this as I do for wiki

Possible solutions:
- Change the requirements for trust level 3
- code the ability to change the trust level

Also note there is trust level 4 which is manually granted, so it can't be lost.

I would suggest:

- Change the TL for wiki to 2
- I agree we should tweak regular status to make it attainable but need more info
-- What percent of posts do the Add-ons posts constitute?
-- Who are some people we believe deserve the "Regular" trust level, what are their stats?
- Grant more people trust level 4 so it can't be lost, and/or make it easy for people to request changes from this group

Comment 2

[Akshay S Dinesh]

Well, I'm not sure that my root problem is not that I'm not able to get the badge. Treating the symptoms might be enough too.