I took all the discussion here, applied some adjustments I will list here, and created a functional spec for user privileges. Please review.
Changes from the discussion here:
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I removed the names below moderator levels. We don’t agree on them and I’m not convinced they help with site operation.
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I recast trust level 6 (admin) as a level one acquires when needed and drops otherwise. This has the useful property of allowing instance admins to be regular users on sites they’re interested in participating on, without having super-admin powers follow them everywhere. Just because you’re an admin doesn’t mean you’re an expert in all communities. (Also added logging for all trust-level changes, so admins can be audited by other admins.)
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Level 0: added the ability to upvote answers to your own questions. Yes that can be abused, but a new user should be able to indicate which answers were helpful and we’ll need voting-fraud measures anyway. (Added upvotes in general to level 1. They weren’t specified, which I didn’t notice until I got to downvotes later.)
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Level 1: I changed this to “May post N questions per day, where N is the number of well-received questions or answers already posted, but at least 5.” (5 because level 0 grants 3 QPD and it should go up.) Note that this limit only applies to questions but takes both questions and answers into account, so that somebody who’s been helpful via answers doesn’t get blocked for not having asked many questions. I feel like this could still be improved but I’m not sure what to do here.
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Level 3: I lowered the number of flags again. It needs to be achievable.
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Level 4: I lowered the number of reviews from 500 to 250, and instead of saying you need a minimum in each review category, I said there need to be at least two review types where you have more than 50. I did that because some review types might not have enough events to generate 100 (or whatever) reviews. Maybe we want to say three categories rather than two. We haven’t specified reviews yet, or if we have I’ve missed it. So for MVP this whole bullet point might be a no-op anyway – but it’s also the only requirement for this trust level, so needs more attention.
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Level 5: I added annotations, sending private messages to users, and viewing of both.