Trust levels seem to affect a lot about how people see the site. If it’s true that TL2 people can’t see some content but TL3 people can [1], this could cause a lot of confusion.
One possible solution would be to allow those at higher trust levels to choose to (temporarily) view the site as though they were at any lower TL. I have no idea if this is an option in Discourse currently; should this be raised upstream or is there a way to do it?
unconfirmed but people have complained of it ↩︎
I am pretty sure the only thing TL3 users can see that lower levels can’t is that they have the ability to press “expand” on the auto-hidden content. At least I can’t find any other references to anything in the descriptions of TL3.
TL4 and moderators OTOH can see a lot more (including deleted content), but since I don’t think we have any TL4 users, I don’t think it’s relevant there.
I think it’d be reasonable for any non-trivial user (say, TL1+) to expand those posts–it does seem confusing that some people won’t have the full discussion. But I don’t know if this can be configured at all.
It can, and we are already lower than discourse defaults (if I read it correctly), which is TL4 only.
However, I disagree that it’s reasonable to allow more people to expand these posts. They are hidden because they supposedly contain harmful content. The fact that there appears to be a culture of flagging misuse on this site is a problem that needs to be addressed, but I have no idea how.
With other words: Content that can reasonably be part of a discussions should never have been hidden in the first place. This is the problem that needs to be fixed, not allowing more people to see hidden posts.
The simplest solution: logout and check.
I agree, I have no idea how to fix that, and I’m not sure it can be fixed.
My thought is that egregiously harmful content should be deleted entirely (with some note to that effect) but reasonable people are always going to disagree on what counts as off-topic/unreasonable/otherwise worthy of a flag. And disabling the flags entirely is not a good solution–it just makes moderation even harder.
I do think we should have a policy to not continue discussion if something is flagged (i.e. don’t reply to it unless a moderator unflags it), but allowing users to click to expand the post[1].
which will have a warning on them about why they were flagged, so people can avoid it if they desire ↩︎
As a moderator on another discourse, various people use flagging in various ways. Some people seem to think it’s a bookmark, which I assume comes from familiarity some software that uses flags in that way. Fixing the “culture of flagging” is tilting at windmills.
I think making it so anybody can expand hidden content is fine. It was there before the flag, it’s now hidden by default, and people can decide whether they care enough or are in a state to see it. Importantly, even if it’s horrendously offensive, they know that it has been flagged and pending moderator review, so they do not need to take any further action to make sure it’s addressed.
I’m not at any trust level then. That doesn’t tell me what it looks like at TL1 or TL2.
I think that suggestion was for admins–a way to let them see how a thread looks without access. Is that view different from tl2?
AFAICT the only differences related to content visibility we have on this instance are:
Hmm. Then what were the issues with posts being hidden, but only unhideable by people with sufficient TL?
The first point in the list, people are complaining about that one, specifically in the case of auto-hidden posts.
I don’t agree that it’s an issue, but I am pretty sure that is what they mean.
Normally I can still see that the post is there, though - it’s only the body of it that’s hidden. But people have complained that entire posts vanish without a trace unless you’re at some minimum TL.
Maybe that’s completely wrong, I have no idea.
I don’t recall those complains, maybe one of us misread a complaint. AFAIK, posts completely vanishing only happens if it’s moved or if it’s deleted and 24h have passed.
We have 17:
https://discuss.python.org/badges/4/leader
I’m not sure I was complaining about it, but I certainly would be able to appreciate being able to see hidden posts even though I am TL2 and I will likely never be TL3.
My reasoning is that I don’t interact with the “Python Help” category, I spend a lot of time on this forum reading, and occasionally providing input in Packaging, PEP, and meta discussions mostly. And recently there had been a lot of community hidden posts such that I was no longer able to follow the context of some discussions as they were happening.
The “Python Help” category dominates the number of topics and posts with a lot of accounts that only ever make 1 topic or 1 post, and if you don’t participate in that TL3 is very difficult to achieve. I find it too difficult to follow discussions I am interested in here if I unmute Python Help.
Further, I already help many Python users out in other online communities, particularly on the pip Github Issue tracker, and don’t want to reduce the amount of time I do that in favour of providing help here. Again though, this isn’t a complaint, I’ll try and adjust my behaviour instead if it remains at TL3 and disengage from topics that are receiving community hidden posts.
In general, we do not plan to provide detailed permission explanations to individual users, as that does not scale and users should focus on staying on topic and following the participation guidelines. Gaining additional permissions don’t meaningfully affect the ability to use the forums for their intended purpose.
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