This is what it says in the information on the category, but when I scroll through and click on some of the users that create new topics, their trust levels say “Member”.
Is this supposed to happen? Is there some kind of other way that people can be allowed to create new topics in that category?
It’s maybe because they ask higher ranks on the Dev Forums to move this topic to like a discussion, or any type of topic that members can’t post in strict categories.
I guess it just prevents a spam from members that could or could not follow the format of discussion, or it’s off-topic.
What @sjr04 said, Regulars can do this, not members.
Ah I see. I only read half the title and oversaw the bit where you mentioned members. I don’t know why. Staff seem to move it from another category to there. But this is not going to happen anymore. Don’t bypass the restriction by intentionally posting in the wrong category
Hi there! I can confirm that folks on the Developer Engagement Team have been moving support topics that haven’t explicitly fit into any of the support categories into #discussion over the past week or two. I wanted to clarify that due to the confusion this can cause and the potential for users to cheese their way into a Regular-only section, we will no longer be doing this. Instead, threads that don’t fit any support category guidelines will be quietly closed and unlisted. Sorry for the mix-up!
Why does Discussion have to be “Regular-only”? If the new member has posted something and you feel that it is fit to go there rather than be deleted/unlisted/whatever, then it may as well have been posted by a “Regular” and there’s no point in imposing artificial limits by rank.
As far as I’m aware the only difference between New Member and Member is the trust level (as they are quite literally called trust levels), so if you have read their post and basically approved it to go to Discussion, why care about their rank?
This confusion could be very simply resolved by stating that New Members sometimes have their posts moved to Discussion, while Members can post in there without explicit approval. It’s not cheesing to have your post moved after being reviewed by a moderator, this is the whole point of the post approval system that has been controlling most of the forum since forever.
It still feels like a cheat though. It’s almost as if people could take advantage of the system because it’s not technically supposed to happen that way. To me I think it’s definitely cheesing.
It’s not cheesing to me. You make a post, a moderator sees it and decides it’s good enough to go to Discussion, and moves it. The fact that it doesn’t fit into another category doesn’t mean it’s not worth being discussed, hence it being moved rather than just being removed from the forum.
I can understand how it can look like cheating, since otherwise Discussion is (for some reason) strictly run as if New Members should never own a topic.
Unfortunately it seems like dev engagement is going to follow the trend of never letting NMs into Discussion, and cease to move posts that would fit better there, in favor of telling the author “Sorry, rank up to post this idea”.
I believe Discussion should be open to the same post approval procedure at least. Even though some people like myself have grown too upset with the moderators to use post approval anymore, it would benefit a rather large portion of the forum who don’t meet the mysterious criteria to be ranked up.
This is unfortunately a matter of manpower vs user quantity.
Member is a role easily accessible and as proven by Post Approval, 80% of topics and replies Members were posting in the category were completely and grossly unsuitable. Post Approval was taken off this category and this category locked for this reason. It is simply too much work to audit these posts when more important categories exist (i.e. Platform Feedback), and opening the category to all Members would lead to its immediate catastrophic degradation. Use search to find these topics, we will not reiterate the same discussion here.
We similarly also cannot simply move topics out of other categories into Discussion because users will quickly learn that this is the way to game the system and post in Discussion despite restrictions. It will lead to an increase in intentionally miscategorized topics, which results in an increasingly larger workload for DET and overall degradation of the forum. It is fundamentally damaging, unfair, and incorrect, even if unfortunate in particular cases.
Simply put, all things considered, it’s for the best not to allow exceptions here for the time being.