I recently suggested to a new user to post his question (16980) on the sandbox as it had some issues and I thought he could benefit and narrow down the question to something that wouldn't be closed as off topic. He responded he tried to do that but needs 5 reputation in order to post to meta. I presume the requirement is there to mainly stop spammers in meta but aren't we barring the sandbox from people who most need it?
1 Answer
The reason, why one needs 5 reputation to participate in meta is written in the help center:
Because we allow anonymous participation, we require a small bit of parent site reputation to prevent spam, and ensure that meta is for active, engaged members of the community.
This was never a problem. But now we have our own sandbox in the meta, and I agree that we should allow 1-rep-users to post their question draft into the sandbox. After all, the sandbox is made for users who are not yet fully accustomed to the rules of this stack.
I don't think the amount of spam in meta will drastically rise if we lower the meta privilege to 1 rep. The Programming Puzzles & Code Golf stack for example has this (for the same reason), and they don't have spam problems.
Therefore I say:
Reduce the needed reputation for the meta participation privilege to 1 for this stack
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Worldbuilding is still at 5 though, as far as I can see: worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4896/46078. I can't really find why though– Tinkeringbell ModJul 26, 2018 at 11:03
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Should I repost this as feature request? I don't think editing the tag is fair as there are already votes for the discussion that might not apply for the feature request.– OntamuJul 26, 2018 at 11:20
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2@Tinkeringbell The reason is that this would be a meta-wide change and we wanted to keep those to a minimum. We already raised the protection threshold (which might be something you guys could run into at one point, too, if you use the same guidelines about deleting drafts that we are currently using on WorldBuilding). Jul 26, 2018 at 11:24
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1@Ontamu, I think it's fine to have a discussion about pro's and con's before asking to actually lower the reputation threshold for meta. So unless you really want to ask to lower the rep (and not why it should/shouldn't be lowered), this is fine :)– Tinkeringbell ModJul 26, 2018 at 11:29
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@Ontamu no it's okay. But I think it would be better if you don't accept this yet and give other users some time to post and vote on answers that say 'don't do it'. The world is big and not everybody is awake right now ;) Jul 26, 2018 at 11:29
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@Secespitus, to be really nitpicky: Do you know the reason why meta-wide changes are kept to a minimum?– Tinkeringbell ModJul 26, 2018 at 11:36
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@Tinkeringbell Being different from the standard is making things more difficult for users/moderators/staff because expectations about how the site works are not met. Exaggerated example: "You don't have to worry about attracting lots of new users to some discussion on Meta - there is an auto-protection" ... "Except, we disabled that." ... "Okay, but at least they need to have contributed something positive to the site, so the feedback is likely valuable" ... "Except, we disabled that, too." Debugging stuff that's unusual is always difficult. Monica might know more specific reasons. Jul 26, 2018 at 11:44
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@Secespitus I think we failed to follow through on that. Looking into it now. Anyway, I don't recall a decision not to do it. Jul 26, 2018 at 19:49
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@MonicaCellio I was under the impression that we dropped the discussion because of the potential issues I mentioned above and because of taking the step to raise the protection limit already, so that we wouldn't have too many meta-wide changes because of the Sandbox at once. There were also some voices in the comments about lowering the rep requirement being a bad request, although the answers only suggest different degrees of "We could do this", all of which have positive votes. Should I write a feature-request for this on WB meta? The linked discussion was specifically a discussion . Jul 26, 2018 at 20:30
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1@Secespitus good plan, thanks! I didn't reread all the comments; I saw supportive answers and figured we mods had just dropped the ball or something. Maybe it was more complicated. Anyway, a FR on our meta is a good way to get community review. Jul 26, 2018 at 20:43
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2@Tinkeringbell Update: WorldBuilding.SE has lowered the rep requirement to participate on Meta to 1. Aug 10, 2018 at 6:27