Not withstanding the horrors I had here yesterday when I discovered in here is some 1991 Netscape Navigator 0.01B-01 policy of not allowing more than 1 picture attachment for a new member like me (sigh…),
Today I wanted to post some feedback to some VERY KIND members who helped me trying to get something at all accomplished, and am presented with:
“You’ve reached the maximum number of replies a new user can create on their first day. Please wait 29 minutes before trying again.”
Can I get an honest answer? You hate members, don’t you? And it’s not just the forum boss, the documentation chief also hates members, right?
Yes, I’m cynical. Why would that be?
When I invite a new guest in my house (or @Google) I don’t start with telling them what they CAN’T do, or don’t give them guidance to where the toilet is.
As far as I understand, that’s the discourse default to avoid spam. But given we haven’t had any big issues with spam recently, I’m not sure there’s a point to keeping it that strict unless we see problems starting to happen.
Suppose you want a new Gmail account, and we decide you are only allowed to send 2 emails a day, and not more than 1 per hour, because you are a newbie. Gmail wouldn’t be what it was
There’s many more advanced yet at the same time customer friendly methods of keeping trolls out than customer hating policies.
Yes indeed.
While I probably tried doing it curbing expressing my frustrations a bit (not pressing ‘send’ on my first-impulse posts), but my experiences and sentiments were (and are) very similar to what DonBello is expressing on this and other topics.
Honestly, in both of the two cases where the first-24-hour post limit was triggered, I think it was right to slow down the users a bit. Mass-posting in a community that you don’t know too well yet tends to cause more issues than a forced break.
As I said before, a softer limit may be better (warning after, say, the seventh post, together with some tips like “if you want to support or thank for a post, just click on the ‘like’ heart instead of posting ‘thanks’ or ‘me too’”), but it is something that would need to be built into Discourse.
Remember also that the other limitations, such as the limit on links or images in posts, are automatically lifted after a short while of looking around in other topics etc.; which is something you absolutely should do when coming into a new community.
I disagree completely. I feel (and felt) that as a patronizing principle.
It has become clear to me that there are more than enough responsive, friendly and civilized members that can and will adjust the sort of postings you seem to be so afraid of.
Also the ‘spam’ argument in my opinion is not relevant to the issues raised by me and DonBello.
I am wondering if your are refering to the two current cases or the sum total?
My memory - already demonstrated to be as fallible as my visual perception today - tells me that at least one other new user has reported on this forum about getting blocked by the limit.
Most of the spam the forum gets luckily gets flagged as such and hidden from view of “regular users”. It’s still here though.
Also, I have also experienced spammers “slipping through” the automated flagging and posting their X posts (topics/responses). If there was no limit on how many posts they could post, I could easily wake up one morning to visit the forum and seeing it flooded with 100s of messages (or whatever the limit is set to). The current limit might be a bit too low, but AFAIK there’s not currently a setting in Discourse to raise the limit.
If someone advocates for being able to customise the limit to/with upstream Discourse and it gets implemented, feel free to ping me so I can raise the limits here.
Also, this document has several good points and should be read as the first thing by all new users (and regularly by all—myself included!): https://community.metabrainz.org/faq
