This Discourse forum is provided by the OERu to help learners and educators communicate with one another. Like all online tools, Discourse has a learning curve, and we’re keen to make that curve as easy as possible for people to climb!
If you have questions about how this forum works (or is meant to work), please reply to this topic!
Question: why are other people I know allowed to do things on this forum that I can’t seem to do?
Answer: this forum software, Discourse, has developed a way of managing user capabilities (permissions) using a “trust model” where people who have “done more stuff” in the forum, like responding to posts, liking things, and other actions, are gradually rewarded for their participation by receiving increasing levels of “trust”.
Each user starts at level 0 and can progress to level 4 (so, 5 levels total).
With each increase in trust level, a given user (there should be one actual person associated with any given “user”, as dictated by their email address and password) is able to see more “controls” when working with the forum - they can do more things and take more responsibility.
The Discourse developer community offers this comprehensive view of how Discourse trust levels work.