Alternative to Post Approval Idea

As you may know, it is currently impossible for members to earn the regular role and have access to the benefits ever since PA was removed. I feel like this is super unfair for members like me who don’t have this opportunity. I am aware that there are other complaints on this but this topic is not about that. I have an idea that could be used as an alternative for PA. I will go through the specifics of my idea one by one.

The first step on the journey to become a member is to receive at least 400 likes and 10 solutions. After completing that step, there could be a subcategory in one of the major categories in where the member has to keep the poll in the template but can add onto it. They can explain why they should be a regular and the rest is up to the community. If they don’t get enough votes to determine if they should be a regular, it could be sent to a Moderator, staff, or community sage/editor for review. Players would only be able to create a submission once a month to reduce the amount of reviews that could be sent to mods, staffs, or community sage/editor.

If you have any suggestions please tell me. I feel strong about my idea, but it could do with some improvements.

This suggestion seems to go against the current trajectory of the forum to involve the community less in stuff like this, and leave that to devrel. Unless I am misunderstanding,

you would want the community to be able to vote as well. But there could be biases involved in their reasoning for saying yes or no, such as (un)conscious bias for a friend, or disliking someone for a reason. And likes/solutions were never part of promotion criteria before, it’s really easy to get that amount of likes/solutions in a couple months just by being helpful in support categories, and likes unfortunately are farmed for in #updates:announcements.

Also, moderators are staff.

6 Likes

Maybe making likes from #updates:announcements not count towards the like count would prevent like targeting? It’s true that sometimes people with be bias. Maybe in order to vote, they have to reply with the reason they chose that option. That reply could be reviewed to be accurate and reasonable. If not, the vote is not counted against the player.

So you are saying I should edit how many solutions and likes you should have or just complete erase it? I feel as though it shows that you are helpful to the community though.

I don’t think that is even possible with Discourse, or at least not without going through every post a user has made which would be reeeeeeeallyyyyyyyyy slow.

You can also mark your own post as the solution in cases where you find the solution yourself. Again, I don’t think Discourse supports distinguishing from self-solutions, so it would involve going through all of someone’s solutions. In general stats should not be used as a metric since it just encourages farming and contributing just for the sake of contributing because you expect some sort of reward.

3 Likes

To add on those, you can’t receive access to new categories using a stats option or something like that. You may only receive access to new categories with groups and trust levels.

The thing you’re talking about is impossible, unless the Sages waste their time in order to make a plugin about that. Since the Sage and CE trust levels could be discontinued soon, this will more likely not happen.

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I see what you are saying and Discourse really limits the possibilities. Maybe just remove the stats required and only require the topics that can be created once a month by only members. This would remove the stats required and reduce the amount of topics a moderator has to review.

I don’t think community sages/editors power will be lost. The change was mainly for the fact of removing the flair provided to them.

Unfortunately, this is not scalable for a forum of that size. It also took me a lot of time to receive just a few solutions even when I helped a lot of people, so it shouldn’t be a required statistic. Not only that, but solutions are a plugin made by Discourse, not a built-in feature.

I already posted about this in one of my posts as I see how they shouldn’t be used as requirements.

We’ll see, but this is what I found on the profiles of lesserfantasy and buildthomas:

Also, this won’t happen since the main advantage of becoming a Regular is posting on Platform Feedback without any limitations. So, they’ll have obtained the rank and that main advantage without knowing what to do.

You can’t speak for everyone since everyone has different opinions. For me, becoming a member is not just for the ability to post on Platform Feedback.

This is not an opinion? Why would the promotions be paused otherwise

DET should hurry up with the next version of Post Approval.
Making a way for members to become Regular in this time without PA would only lower the quality of the forum, because they’ll create even more posts just for the sake of posting.

TL;DR: No support for this to protect the quality of the forum.

No, then people would report to like botting and creating alts, I do not agree.

I can actually agree with this, because a lot of people would be able to bypass the system. People become regulars because they see that they can be trusted. Someone can post 100 thousand times to get the required stats to apply.

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I’m pretty sure I hit those stats within 2 months of joining. Not sure if that’s abnormally fast or not, but even so, I still think ranking up that quick is too fast. I don’t support this until the stats are higher.