The qualifications for becoming a Trust Level 2 is pretty low, so it only diverts people that never got a heart or sent a heart, and have never read an hour worth of 100 posts, and never posted. While this helps hide it from total strangers, some teachers and parents, it might be worth raising the requirements to reach Trust Level 2, just for extra precaution.
Trust Level 2 – Member Members keep coming back to your community over a series of weeks; they have not only read, but actively participated long and consistently enough to be trusted with full citizenship.
Get to trust level 2 by…
Visiting at least 15 days, not sequentially Casting at least 1 like Receiving at least 1 like Replying to at least 3 different topics Entering at least 20 topics Reading at least 100 posts Spend a total of 60 minutes reading posts
I would suggest raising this to:
Visiting 60 days total
Casting 10 likes
Receiving 10 likes
Replying to 20 different topics
Entering at least 40 topics
Reading at least 200 posts
Spend a total of 300 minutes (5 hours) reading posts
That way you know they’re trying to be an actual user and not just checking the place out
Trust level 3 is not easy for everyone to maintain, I’ll admit… but there were valid points made about parents and teachers viewing the forum. I guess it just didn’t occur to me that Flowlab was meant to be primarily an educational tool, I just thought it was a fun and easy way to make games. But I respect the desire to keep the place looking professional to outsiders.
The lounge should be available for anyone who wants to join it for the right reasons, not if they’re going to use it to troll or post offensive content… and I’m okay with keeping it hidden and only viewable if you have clicked an option to enable it. That way a casual passerby would only see posts about games.
For newer users, the option would be off by default. They should have to manually enable it.
I just like 50 posts a day, old or new but mostly new replies to keep regular, then I also usually post useless messages like these to keep my reply count average. This makes it so I cannot ever lose Trust Level 3
EDIT: I also edit a post of my old or new to keep the edit streak goin’
They had silly counting games, word association games, memes, songs, poems, fanfiction, etc. All of them would oftentimes veer wildly off topic from the game, but nobody cared as long as it was in the Community section and stayed out of the serious topics.
And no, this was not a forum frequented by mostly kids.
A demographic poll of the age and gender of the forum’s users:
Minimum age to be on that forum was 13, but I very rarely met anyone there who was younger than 20. Adults can be silly and immature, too… and they definitely get into countless childish arguments on a regular basis (which is why that forum had to have like 12 moderators just to keep the peace on an average day).
Surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly), most of the drama came from the regular topics, not the off topic ones.
I have 0 problem with this. Again, I don’t see why the people fought all this, since their primary argument was it flooding the forums, which this changes nothing… But whatever, I’m happy with this.
When I first saw this, I was against the idea of putting the only official Off-Topic channel behind a trust-wall, since I thought it’d block well-meaning users from getting to know or have fun with the community.
Then I realized that’s probably for the best, since lets be honest more people probably end up embarrassing themselves on those annoying threads then anywhere else on the forums, and now i’m not sure what to think.
I will say this though: We really need a second poll after this asking the community if they believe “Community off-topic channels” should be banned with the existence of the official one, since I am on that bandwagon all the way. (Due to redundancy and all that)
I don’t think anyone embarrassed themselves on there unless you have personal experiences, but we do use to chat about our daily life (sometimes), memes, and other family friendly non flowlab stuff. Which from my point of view it doesn’t seem to be hurting anyone, but I guess it is.
Am I embarrassing myself when I talk about how I couldn’t afford to finish college? Or when I mention that I had zero coding experience before I joined Flowlab? Or when I talk about how I was always into video games and other “nerdy” kind of stuff?
If so… I’m okay with that. I like to keep it real.
I’m not sure. it would be great for categorizing topics that are just for hanging out, and talking about whatever. as long as the off topic posts stay as calm off-topic discussions between creative people (maybe sharing projects from outside flowlab, talking about their lives, etc.) and don’t turn into heated arguments about stupid things, I think it should be alright.
on paper, I think an off-topic category sounds like a great idea, because there are so many great people on these forums that I would love to talk to about whatever, I just worry because topics like that have been misused numerous times to start arguments for no reason.
More good than harm had come out of it in my opinion, the occasional argument (mostly by a guy no longer using flowlab), but mainly memes, support, games, polls and other great break room stuff.
I am not going to say much, other than my idea:
I like the idea of trust level 3 than trust 2, as I find it extremely easy to get to 2, but I can see the problem for getting to three. So, make trust level 2 the same thing as always, but once reaching Mhx_Air’s recommendation of:
then you can access a new off topic section. I also don’t think they should ping notif unless mentioned, or just have it auto locked to normal, to stop flooding on there as well.
Hope this works out
If people want a ping, why can’t they? You can always manually turn it off, that seems unnecessary. And if you make it hard to get, then you’ll have a bunch of 8-year-olds spamming topics every day to get tl3.
What I don’t get is that the otc is perfectly fine and doesn’t bring harm or anything. It’s usually when people just start flagging it and even though they technically have the right to, but that’s usually what starts the argument. Then the otc and the forums get punished for it
I guess just don’t flag it or just leave it be to prevent future arguments.
One reason why I want it to be a trust level 2 access so that bots don’t go flagging it or something and causing mayhem that no active users even participated in, but then again it’s supposed to be a public talk room for things unrelated to flowlab, so it’s supposed to be for everyone so I’m very undecided on this.
Then why are people taking into account for the otc being a trust level 2 when it indirectly caused arguments? Which I don’t mind it at all, but I’m still concerned why it must be changed because of something like that.
