Glad to see discussion was recently renamed to development discussion, however I’ve seen a lot (in that, 7 a day) discussion topics are made which better fit #help-and-feedback.
DET seemingly don’t want to lock dev discussion off new members fully; perhaps it could be made that you need a few contributions to post in development discussion.
Here’s how it’d work.
A plugin can, once the user has made a few unflagged posts, they’d be automatically added to a private group which gives permission to post in development-discussion.
I believe this is the perfect compromise, allowing new(er) forum users to contribute, without hindering everyone else’s experience.
They could also try make reading the rules for this forum a requirement to becoming a member? That could fix the problem for #development-discussion and for other rules which are broken.
Another thing to add is a cooldown on posting topics, especially when they’re flagged. If anyone still has notifications on for the category, in under 40 minutes, ONE person posted more than 10 topics in #development-discussion. The Forum should somehow encourage our posts to be lengthier, fruitful, and merged together rather than 10 different topics about one sentence each. And most of them post for the sake of posting. They ask “what is your favorite ____?” and “how have you dealt with ____?” which is of no use to them, just to start a discussion for absolutely no reason. The old, mainly better ones usually were posted because people themselves have had some issues themselves. For example, if someone’s game is bombarded with exploit reports, then they ask how others do it. The bad thing I see with posting for the sake of posting is that it reserves a spot for a better, more fruitful post because it’d count as “duplicate”.
Another fix would be to have #development-discussion posts that are posted by members to undergo a modified post approval. TL2 users could approve or “disapprove” posts.
If a post reaches 3 approval points then it would be put in #development-discussion. If a post reaches -3 approval points then the post would be sent to a place where TL3/ TL4 users could dismiss the post or give the appropriate punishment to the rule-breaker.
To prevent any biases, the OP would remain anonymous to TL2 users. You would also need to write a small message if you decide to disapprove a post so it would discourage any misbehaving TL2 users from disapproving topics for entertainment.
Members could reply freely to topics where engineers normally do not look at. If they were to reply to a topic in #platform-feedback then it would only require an approval point of 1. It can go to -2 approval points before it gets sent to TL3/ TL4 users for moderation.
If a TL2 user consistently approves rule-breaking posts or if they misuse the disapprove feature then they would receive the appropriate punishment.
On the other hand, if a TL1 user has a history of using TL2+ controlled categories properly then they would be promoted to regular. If a TL2 consistently approves good posts and disapproves bad ones then they would be invited to TL3.
So post approval but TL2+ also get involved. While resources wouldn’t be an issue, since there is more TL1 users than TL2, and more TL2 than TL3, you basically have even more community members volunteering which is what developer relations wanted to avoid according to buildthomas. (or maybe he just meant that community was intentionally not involving themselves in this, I really don’t know)