When i first started using the forums i quite swiftly reached TL3. The level itself isn’t that important but i liked making use of a few TL3 features such as updating post-tags.
After a short period of less activity i dropped out of TL3, since this trust level is time dependent. Now the interesting thing is that once you drop out, it becomes less likely than initially that you will reach it back.
I think there are a few reasons for this, but the main one may be this:
When you first sign up, all topics are new so every thread you open is counted as a new read. After you’ve been around for a while you’ve read most of the long-running threads and you become ‘dependent’ on actual new threads to reach TL3. There are only about 150 new threads a week in total on the subforums combined (slightly more after new releases), of which maybe 20% are relevant to you since most threads involve specific hard/software and use cases.
So with ~30 new threads that you may read weekly, which is basically everything that is posted that is interesting to you, you may be right around the threshold of reaching TL3. However, this implies that you have to keep doing this more or less daily, or you won’t reach the threshold.
In this scenario the trust level becomes mostly dependent on how much you scroll. It doesn’t reflect how much you otherwise have interacted on the forums or if those interactions were useful.
So my suggestion would be to lower the reading requirements, or perhaps as an alternative make TL3 sticky so users that are trusted at some point don’t have to keep scrolling in order to retain that level (in contrast to other trusted levels like TL4 and moderator that don’t have that requirement).
Thanks for reading 