Does a being blessed with the "Sage" badge bestow any additional Discourse authority?

Continuing the discussion from What is the value of a current signature on an extension?:

Where @DanRathbun points out that 4 people with the “Sage” badge materially contributed to an off-topic diversion in the thread - with two of them wishing that the off-topic replies would be split off into it’s own thread.

After reviewing the User Trust Levels information in this forum, my conclusion is: No. The “Sage” badge doesn’t confer any authority.

Given the number of times Sages (and to a lesser extent, others) have suggested splitting a topic, or flagged a series of replies for being off topic, perhaps it’s time for us to request that the Forum Administrators consider granting “Administrator” authority (level) so a few of the Sages who are NOT Trimble employees.

Your thoughts?

not admin rights but moderation rights:

With regard to the mentioned thread being hijacked, Julia and I had a short private convo about this, and she proposed the idea that forum sages should get pruning power, and I agree.

I imagined that sages would see another reply button aka “prune reply” which does what the “Reply in New Topic” does, but also takes the original off-topic post being replied to, along as the OP of the new thread.

This would need to be proposed over at Discourse Meta.

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That would work. And I would have suggested that if I’d known about it! My “administrator” suggestion was based on available information about trust levels from this forum, not realizing that there are other ways of granting authority.

never mind :sunglasses:

Okay, it looks like Moderator privileges would do.

EDIT:

Uh huh (nods) … @sjdorst, this IS what I meant by “would do”.

Just to be clear, based on my reading on the Discourse Forum post @sketch3d_de referenced above, user trust levels and user “states” are two different things that already exist in Discourse.

The status of “Moderator” is a state, not a trust level. They are set separately in the user table. (Moderator is one field - a boolean flag, and trust level is a different, numeric field). So this doesn’t need to be proposed over at Discourse Meta - it already exists.

Which means that, for our purposes, our forum Administrators need only to agree on a criteria for setting the “Moderator” flag for non-Trimble employees - then do it!

What else but the prune power is including at in this moderator privilege? I would understand if Trimble doesn’t want to give too much power to non-employed community members but giving more people the ability to split topics would certainly be useful. Especially people spread across more time zones had that power.

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Discourse Meta: Description of various user states in Discourse says:

Moderator

Power user capable of moderating the site:

  • Gets shield icon next to name on posts
  • Can perform all actions Staff can perform

Staff

A user that is either an admin a moderator or both.

  • Immune to rate limits
  • Can process flags
  • Can delete topics and posts, split topics, merge topics, hide topics and so on.
  • Can view user info including email address

But the “and so on” is a bit abiguous.

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I just tried to read closely the Discourse Meta Forum Post “Discussion of various user states in Discourse” (Yes - I could make this a link, but @sketch3d_de already has above, and should get credit for any click throughs!)

Three *states are involved.

  • Admins can (among other things) “Perform all the actions moderators can perform”.
  • Moderators “Can perform all actions Staff can perform”
  • Staff (which is derived from a logical OR of the Admin and Moderator flags in the User Table) can, indeed, split topics, but they can ALSO “Process flags” and “view user info including email address”.

Somehow, I don’t see Trimble giving non-employees access to the email address of Forum participants!

So now I’m leaning towards thinking that granting “Moderator” status (state) to non-Trimble employees shouldn’t be our solution.

Perhaps Trimble could let this community know which of their staff is willing - and able - to review topic split requests.

<Edit a few minutes later>
Looks like @DanRathbun and I were checking out the details and writing about it simultaneously!
</Edit>

I manually edited the URL of the external link (per Giving Credit (for links) where credit is due - #2 by DanRathbun), so credit will go to the finder. (I hope.)

I would hope that individual powers could be toggled.

The Sage group was a special “semi-moderator” addition, whose trust level were set to static. (They do not have to maintain a certain number of posts or reads per day, etc. Their status is static compared to normal users, who’s trust level will decay with nonuse.)

So because they are a special state, I’d hope certain powers can be granted on a power by power basis.

The sages have been asking for this for a long time. It still hasn’t happened.

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