Currently, as of 12/2/24, it is possible to receive a forum ban / silence for posting otherwise innocent replies to threads. Upon being banned, the system incorrectly refers to your account as “new”, even if it is over 7 years old!
Recently, I posted the following reply to a thread about discovery:
Some time after this post (~4 days), I’d received an automated message telling me I’d been banned / silenced on the forums, which was triggered by the aforementioned post:
I just want to reply on behalf of the user @boatbomber
They also got the same issue at the same time and can no longer post on the devforum because they’re muted unfairly.
Looked into it and this is a hyper-specific issue that shouldn’t occur again going forward.
On the forum, we use Discourse’s groups feature to manage access to certain categories. Groups have a setting that can be toggled to auto-grant a trust level when someone is added to that group. Some internal teams like DevRel used this feature so that they can simplify how they do onboarding for creators that they work with.
The problem with this setting is that (on our current Discourse version, at least), it is riddled with bugs, such as upon removal from the group, it doesn’t check whether your trust level was granted due to being added to this group or if you already had the trust level before. It will auto-level you down to trust level 0 in certain situations when it shouldn’t.
We cleaned up a bunch of old categories and groups a few days back and it looks like you and boatbomber were in at least 1 of these groups. We were already aware of the bug and toggled the setting mentioned above back to default before deleting the groups, but it turns out that wasn’t enough to prevent the issue in some cases.
So what happened was:
These groups were misconfigured at some point to auto-level incoming users to TL1.
Even though we fixed the group config back to default before removing the groups, you were still auto-leveled down to TL0 briefly.
Since you obviously meet the read time thresholds to auto-level up to TL1, you may have immediately gotten TL1 after being ranked down to TL0.
(unexpected) Later on, some automated job that checks for spam still flagged your account because you briefly were TL0 and were added to a list of users to check for spam.
We checked all accounts involved after cleanup to ensure they weren’t trust level 0, but we didn’t anticipate that last step were an automated job silencing your accounts much later on (multiple hours later), so this wasn’t caught before it happened unfortunately.
This shouldn’t occur again because we’re explicitly not toggling this group setting on new groups going forward, and moreover this only happened because of a one-time cleanup action on the forum that touched about ~50 private subcategories and ~40 private groups.
