The distinction is too small and confuses. Even seeing them side by side it’s not clear which is more introductory than the other. “Newbie” and “Recent Member” is a possibility.
Another thought on question rate limits:
- Initial limit 3 per day - More than that gives you an explanation about:
Welcome to our site. Since you’re new here, let’s get your first 3 questions answered first and then you’ll be able to ask more questions.
I think most people would understand that quite well.
- Additional initial time limit of 1 per hour. This should easily minimize spam robot activity. Here the explanation would be something like:
Welcome to our site. We see you just asked your first question and are trying to ask another question. Many new users don’t realize they can edit their questions to add additional details [followed by explanation of how to do that]. If this is really an new question, just wait an hour and you will be able to post it. As you get more experience with the system, you will be able to post without having to wait between questions.
I would also, make all of the following configurable both per instance and per site:
- Number of questions in first day
- Number of questions per [additional day, upvoted questions, etc.]
- Time rate limit for new (e.g., 1 hour) and trusted (e.g., 1 minute - mainly to catch hijacked accounts or users gone bad/mad) users
- Text for each of these explanations
6 Likes
The names sound fine. But I do think, as noted above, that we could use one more “in between” level.
There is always a flow of new users, some of which we don’t want to stick around. Lack of questions on established sites is simply not a problem.
Then rate limiting answers doesn’t make any sense. What you are saying is that it’s the experts that come to a site and want to post multiple answers right away. You want them to do that.
The other effective rate limiter would be giving people awards for the number of days where all questions were well received.
Because mathematically, if you have 4 good questions and 1 bad one, asking one question per day vs all on the same day gives you much faster progress towards the award.
2 Likes
Multiple posting in the first day(s) mostly occurs with answers (and not so much with questions) or also with people that turn out to have higher rep later.
Limiting questions is not gonna achieve what you wish, because most of the questions are not like that and among the questions that are like it you find relatively many questions from experts (based on rep).
If you want to fight question quality, then using posting frequency is not a good way to filter them out (and it just creates annoyed users). Bad selectivity and sensitivity.
3 Likes
This implies to get to TL1, you must ask a question. What about people who just come to answer questions? Are they forever stuck at TL0?
4 Likes
No - it’s meant to be questions/answers. Apologies for being inspecific.
1 Like
Opinions on TL0 being called “Initiate”?
2 Likes
This query grabs counts users who asked at least 3 questions on the day they signed up,
Select count(users.id) from
posts p
join posts p2 on p.owneruserid = p2.owneruserid and p.id < p2.id and p.posttypeid =1 and p2.posttypeid=1
join posts p3 on p.owneruserid = p3.owneruserid and p.id < p3.id and p3.id != p2.id and p.posttypeid =1 and p3.posttypeid=1
join users on p.owneruserid = users.id
and DATEADD(Day, DATEDIFF(Day, 0, users.CreationDate), 0) = DATEADD(Day, DATEDIFF(Day, 0, p.CreationDate), 0)
and DATEADD(Day, DATEDIFF(Day, 0, users.CreationDate), 0) = DATEADD(Day, DATEDIFF(Day, 0, p2.CreationDate), 0)
and DATEADD(Day, DATEDIFF(Day, 0, users.CreationDate), 0) = DATEADD(Day, DATEDIFF(Day, 0, p3.CreationDate), 0)
where users.CreationDate > ‘2014’
and yes the number of people doing that is very low.
- Outdoors 4
- Mi Yodeya 73
- Code Review 38
If you run an average of the rep, it seems that this would be a predictor of quality vs not, although the caveat here is that deleted posts and spam don’t show up.
3 Likes
I went through the synonyms,
https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/newbie
https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/beginner
and I think that “Initiate” makes the most sense. Unless we want Abecedarian 
1 Like
What about “Registered” to indicate that the only thing they did so far was to register on our site. So it could also be a technical differentiation between anonymous and registered users.
4 Likes
It doesn’t say that they didn’t do more than that. The 100,000 rep user is registered too.
“Initiate” says it all.
Deputies are “members” too, but “member” is the name of a lower trust level. I think it’s ok to use “registered” for the first level.
To me, “initiate” invokes images of religious orders, fraternities, and cults.
5 Likes
I was thinking of that too. Words do change over time, but I think this one has enough “bad blood” to not be a good choice here.
3 Likes
Yeah, and that’s also confusing. How about “new member”?
1 Like
I don’t think this is confusing at all. A lot of communities use a ladder hierarchy such as this; people higher up the ladder are also members of every step below them.
4 Likes
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:
-
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.
8 Likes
Two things to confirm:
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This means my “Minor Edit” vs. “Major Edit” with different Trust Levels + “Allow users to block Major Edits if they want (except from Moderators)” etc. doesn’t get into the system. Which is OK - it was mainly to satisfy one person’s concerns about unwanted edits - though hopefully at least a “This is a minor edit” setting can still get in somewhere (but with no difference with respect to Trust Levels required).
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I still wonder/worry about “need lots of flags” to get far. 50 flags for Trust Level 3 seems like a lot. Or at least, to me, 50 edits is no big deal but 50 flags seems excessive. I frequently edit posts for grammar/spelling/etc. but relatively rarely Flag anything. Then again, understanding the flagging process is important for anyone who will actually Review Flags.
2 Likes
On the minor/major edits, until that feature gets defined (and gets consensus) I didn’t include it. Going forward, as we add capabilities we’ll also need to decide where in the trust-level hierarchy people can access them. I tried to keep this draft aligned with the MVP features we know about, even though some features are still unspecified. (Like reviews – how’s that going to work for MVP?)
I share your concern about flag count. I already lowered it a lot so wasn’t sure how far I could go on my own initiative, so to speak. I’m hoping that a “new site” setting where all the requirements get lowered will mitigate for our initial build-out.
4 Likes