I’m a nobody here, but it seems that every day, basic “User” questions get posted to Core Dev instead, at a rate that is a substantial fraction of the total posts and higher than those with high enough permissions to move them are able to deal with them. To avoid spam and off-topic questions, might it be a good idea to limit core dev to TL1+ or even TL2+ users (unless they have or request a special role)? I’m not going to name names, but it seems like a large majority of OT posts and comments are by brand new/TL0 users, and perhaps a few TL1s, while I’m not sure of any I’ve seen that are on-topic that are below TL2 (perhaps a few TL1s here and there).
It seems this would prevent a large majority of OT posts, while in case a brand new user has a genuine need to post there, they can just ask a mod/admin to bump them a TL, if they want to post right away instead of waiting a bit to get familiar with the platform.
I have no idea whether Discourse has such a feature, but new users could be allowed to reply to topics in Core Dev (or other categories, I’ve seen the problem you describe elsewhere), but can’t create topics until they’ve been here a while. That way they can still participate in discussions but it should keep the OT threads out of the Core Dev category.
It’s a little tricky because if you’re brand new and have a legit question on how to e.g. build CPython, then how would you get your reputation up? Randomly comment about things until you got high enough to ask the original question you came for?
I assumed something like this is possible, since I’ve seen it referred to other places? Maybe this could be explicitly stated in the welcome message and/or the description of the category, so that users actually have to read it before they post?