Should Discourse gamification be disabled?

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Is there any way that the Discourse gamification features could be turned off (e.g. limited likes per day, maybe some of the trust level stuff)? I don’t think that gamified forums are conducive to actual profitable collaboration (although that’s just my take on it).

With that being said, there may be some things that just aren’t possible to disable; however, I much prefer software like XenForo or phpBB in terms of functionality, and while I applaud the transition to a more modern forum software stack, I’m concerned that the forum implementation is done right. :slight_smile:

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Another example of antifeatures shows up in KDE Plasma completely freezes in fullscreen except cursor - #2 by ericsson, where the poster is forced to make multiple posts to actually share all the links needed.

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Hi

Discourse allows to tune the settings for trust level.

But by experience with Discourse with default settings, it’s really easy and fast to get higher trust level and being able to participate.

But first topics, especially if people come only to ask one question, can be hard to manage yes.

Grum999

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I agree. It frequently causes me to need to recreate or necropost old posts after I have gained some trust. Most people wouldn’t bother to store the additional information for a few months in the future.

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where the poster is forced to make multiple posts to actually share all the links needed.

I’m not a fan of that either but it may be anti-spam measure as well.

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Discourse is quite good at anti-spam from what I’ve seen as an admin on another Discourse instance. The admins can easily tweak the trust levels until the right balance is attained.

Edit: It also has really nice flagging features for spam should people see it.

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Based on my experience in moderating krita-artists.org the defaults of discourse are well thought and help in moderating spam. But surely yes we can tweak individual settings like max number of links a new user can add or number of uploads or likes for new users etc. Having said that often times I have found going back to defaults when hit by spam wave and it helped me understand why the defaults are the way they are.

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Honestly it’s really easy to unlock the new user restrictions even with minimum effort. It took me about 25 minutes and I wasn’t really intending to.