Welcome to Fedora Discussion! This site is powered by Discourse, forum software which encourages community-based moderation. Key to this is the concept of “Trust Levels”. There is official documentation, but here’s a quick intro (and some details about how we use them here).
Trust Level 0: New to Discussion
This is where all new users start. It’s basically a “safety” level to prevent spam and other trouble from bad actors, and also to help you learn the ropes. You can’t send personal messages, flag posts, or post a lot of links or images. You also can’t edit your post after 24 hours. (This keeps spammers from posting something innocent at first, but then editing in something bad later, when they think we won’t notice. Unfortunately, that’s a common tactic.)
Trust Level 1: Basic Discussion
This level is meant to be really easy to get to. Spend some time reading posts on the site and just looking around in general and you’ll automatically be upgraded. The main benefit is that the above limitations get removed. You’ll also get a few bonus features, like the ability to create polls and linked topics.
Trust Level 2: Discussion Member
Visit at least 15 days (not necessarily in a row) and generally engage, and you’ll get this easily. At this level, you can fix typos or other mistakes in your own posts for up to a month. That way, you don’t have to worry about reclaiming them or anything — just vote for anything that seems like an interesting question or that you think might be particularly useful to others.
Note: obtaining this trust level or higher normally requires giving and receiving a number of 
“likes”, but currently the system doesn’t count the fancy new “reactions” like 
, 
, or 
. We have removed this requirement until the forum software is updated to take the other kinds of reaction into account as well.
Trust Level 3: Discussion Regular
This is the exciting one! It’s for people who have been meaningfully active for at least half of the last 100 days.
Once you reach this level, you automatically get a lot of power. Here are some of the key abilities:
- You can now rename and re-categorize posts. Please do! New users sometimes pick titles that are too broad (“Problem with Fedora???”) and editing them to be more specific is a good way to make the site better.
- You can hide spam posts immediately by flagging them. (Again, please do!)
Note that this level isn’t permanent; if you don’t stay active, you can drop back to Member. That’s okay; the idea is for it to be granted to people who are really involved. We hope that’s you, but it’s also cool if you’ve got other things going on in your life.
Trust Level 4: Discussion Leader
This is almost a moderator level. It’s for folks who have been around the community, understand how we do things, and want to help out. Unlike the others, you get this by manual promotion, not automatically.
Q&A Leaders can:
- Edit all posts. On this site, this is generally for retagging or otherwise organizing sites — maybe also fixing topic titles. See our discussion on site norms around editing.
- Set “slow mode” on a topic. If you see a topic getting out of hand, or which has a lot of unproductive back-and-forth, you can turn this on.
- Split topics. Discourse isn’t great with really long winding conversations, so it’s best to split out tangents. This is also a good idea when someone replies to an existing question with something actually unrelated. When you see these things, you don’t need to ask. Just do it!
- Merge topics. You can also combine things. If you see someone asking something that has just been solved, linking the topics helps everyone find the answer quickly.
- Pin/unpin topics, and close topics or archive topics, or even make them unlisted. This is probably a less frequent thing, but you’ll be trusted to do it if need be.
How can I see my level?
Click on your avatar (the user icon) next to any post — the first badge shown will indicate trust level. Or go to your profile and click “Expand”. This will show a summary line with the date you joined the site and some other information, including your current trust level. (When viewing a profile other than your own, this line is expanded by default.)