New user permissions and availability of posts

[jeffcarlin]

It has been our policy to avoid creating barriers to entry into the Rubin Forum Community, so we have always allowed new users to post to the Forum immediately upon creating an account. However, in response to an increase in bot-created spam postings, we are making some minor changes to the policies for new users. As of today, the following restrictions will be in place on the forum:

• The first 5 posts by a new user must be approved by a moderator; subsequent posts will not need moderation. Moderation is likely to happen quickly, as we have many moderators who are able to approve your post.
• Posts by users with “trust level” less than 2 must be approved by a moderator. See this Forum topic and the blog post linked therein for more info about trust levels.

We will work to ensure that these policies have only a minor effect on users’ Forum interactions.

[davemckay]

Hi,

I am involved with the UK RSP and today we had an outage. I wanted to use the forum to alert users, but this was flagged for moderation, which took several hours (presumably due to the time zone difference).

I assume this is because I have a low trust level? Thus far I’ve made 9 posts and created 3 topics and I’ve followed tips here for levelling up (although I can’t see my trust level indicated anywhere). Is it possible for admin to manually increase my trust level?

Thanks,
Dave

[MelissaGraham]

@davemckay thanks for raising this.

As an admin, I can see that the automatic flagging, and the requirement for moderator approval, for your topic “UK IDAC on-going network issues” was due to a low trust level, yes. Your account was still at trust level 1, though I can see you’ve made >10 posts and read >50. I’ve bumped your account up to ‘trust level 2’ so that you’re exempt from moderator approval going forward.

More generally, I think we could probably lower the requirements on trust level a bit. Perhaps so that only posts by users with trust level 0 need moderator approval, instead of trust level 0 and 1. I’ll raise this discussion internally (attention @jeffcarlin).

[davemckay]

Thanks very much, I think that would be useful, although I’m aware there’s been a spam issue!
Thanks,
Dave

[MelissaGraham]

The minimum trust level for user posts to bypass moderation has been lowered from 2 to 1. We’ll see how that goes but hopefully it can stay there, and issues like this can be avoided in the future.