A note about Trust Levels

Hey everyone

We just hit a milestone of 50+ human users on this forum (not counting me). It’s time to talk about Trust Levels:

Discourse has a trust system where users can, over time, earn the trust of the community and gain abilities to assist in governing their community.

Discourse is designed to offer safe defaults for public communities, even with no active moderation.

0 (new) → 1 (basic) → 2 (member) → 3 (regular) → 4 (leader)

All new users start out in a sandbox with restrictions for everyone’s safety. Trust level 0 (new) users cannot

  • post more than 2 hyperlinks
  • post any images or file attachments
  • send personal messages
  • flag posts or topics
  • have actual links in the “about me” field of their profile
  • @name mention more than 2 users in a post

Every action a user can take is rate limited for safety, and especially so for new users. But don’t worry, new users can transition to trust level 1 in about 10 minutes of reading.

These defaults are safe, but note that while in “bootstrap mode” after you set up your site, all new users will be granted trust level 1 until you reach 50 users.

I felt the need to made this announcement because we just exited bootstrap mode and new users will now start out with trust level 0 by default. This may result in unexpected behavior for new users. But as quoted above, after about 10 or so minutes of lurking, a new user gains trust level 1 which is what all current users are at, apart from staff.

The trust system is one of the many ways Discourse prevents users from hurting themselves or the community and rewards experienced users with more rights as an incentive to help maintain the community.

Let me know if you have questions or face any unexpected behavior from the forum by replying to this topic.