What are Trust Levels and How do they Work?

#1

User trust levels are a way of structuring the community to be self-sufficient and self-regulated by granting experienced users more rights to help maintain and moderate the community that they’re already a part of.

The trust levels are part of an integral and automated system here in the Realtime VFX Community - promotions happen automatically as the requirements are met. See below for details!

What are Badges?
GDC - Riot Games Creative Mixer Info - AT CAPACITY
#2

Level 0: Visitors
New user accounts, which are the most likely to be spammers, bots, etc, are fairly restricted in controls as they get acquainted with our community and earn all of our trust. And while most of you probably don’t need it… this also helps reduce the number of overwhelming options to ease people into it.

Level 0 Users Cannot:

  • Send Private Messages to other users
  • Post Attachments
  • Flag Posts
  • Post more than 2 hyperlinks in a single topic
  • Mention more than 2 users in a post
  • Have hyperlinks in the “About Me” field of their profile (It’ll be temporarily converted to plain text until they are promoted)
#3

Trust Level 1: Basic

Once users spend just a little amount of time exploring the community and proving they are actually interested human beings, they’ll be granted basic access.

Level 1 Granted By:

  • Visiting at least 5 topics
  • Reading at least 30 posts
  • Spending 10 minutes reading posts

Level 1 Users Can:

  • Use all core community functions, such as upload attachments, edit wikis, and flag posts
#4

Trust Level 2: Member

Members keep coming back and have participated long enough in the community to earn complete citizenship.

Level 2 Granted By:

  • Visiting at least 15 days, not sequentially
  • Giving at least 1 like
  • Receiving at least 1 like
  • Replying to at least 3 different topics
  • Visiting at least 20 topics
  • Reading at least 100 posts
  • Spend a total of 60 minutes reading posts

Level 2 Users Can:

  • Create Group PMs by adding outside users
  • Use “Invite others to this topic” for one-click onboarding of new users
  • Daily like limit increased by 1.5x
#5

Trust Level 3: Regular

Regulars are the heart of this community - the active readers and reliable contributors helping to share, teach and inspire the other VFX Artists and shape our industry’s future. Because this is a community meant for and run by all, we’ve decided to begin opening up moderation controls to all users with this level of trust.

Trust Level 3 must be Maintained
Unlike the other trust levels, you can lose trust level 3 status automatically by becoming an idle member. If you dip below the requirements listed below, you’ll automatically drop back to a Member until you return to meet the requirements again. This helps keep the community moderators fresh.

Level 3 Regulars Can:

  • Recategorize and rename topics
  • Access a private “Industry Only Lounge” category only visible to users at trust level 3 and higher
  • All their links can be followed by search engine crawlers (Remove automatic nofollow)
  • Spam flags cast on Visitors automatically remove the post
  • Convert their posts into Wikis (Editable by all Basic Users+)
  • Daily like limit increased by 2x

Level 3 Granted By:
Because we want to filter only the most active members, there is a time restriction for these goals. Within the last 100 Days, the user:

  • Must have visited at least 50% of days
  • Must have replied to at least 10 different topics
  • Of topics created in the last 100 days, must have viewed 25%
  • Of posts created in the last 100 days, must have read 25%
  • Must have received 20 likes, and given 30 likes.*
  • Must not have received more than 5 spam or offensive flags (with unique posts and unique users for each, confirmed by a moderator)
  • Must not have been suspended
#6

Trust Level 4: Mentor

Leaders are exactly that - the role models, educators and mentors of this community. These are the fully empowered members, chosen by the community for the efforts to help sponsor growth, sharing and inspiration across our industry.

Level 4 Mentor Can:

  • edit all posts
  • pin/unpin topic
  • close topic
  • archive topic
  • make topic unlisted
  • Split and merge topics
  • Daily like limit increased by 3x

Level 4 Granted By:
Manual promotion only - as agreed upon by the community. If you’re interested in becoming a Mentor, or have any issues with currently endowed Mentors, please send me a PM.

Frequently Asked Questions (Wiki)
#8

Staff Roles
Like all good machines, sometimes you just need people to get in and do the dirty work.

Moderators
Moderators are given full control of the content within the community, but don’t have ultimate control over the internals and back-end (i.e. they can’t break everything). There are still a few bugs around moderator control of groups and group security, but we’ll hopefully get those ironed out.

Admin
The Admin has full access to the API and internals of this community. Currently just me.