Welcome everyone and congratulations when you participated in this poll. It means that you have actively contributed to this/our community with your opinion. That’s the true value of the community it’s made of.
And apart from regular visits, there are many ways to contribute to a lively and interesting forum. You can mark posts of other members with a “like”, and you can (should) also write comments. Or even better, open your own topic to discuss with the community. That’s what a forum is for.
Discourse is the forum software and it provides multiple levels of membership, based on experience and requirements from several thousands of communities. All together created 3.6 million posts in the last 30 days. 3000 of them were created in this forum, due to the active contributors.
New users start at level 0 and have some limitations mainly to actively contribute. This should prevent spam and users who only join to place a question, expect a quick answer for free and then never appear again. Trust level 1 can be easily achieved by simply spending 10 minutes in the forum and reading through some existing threads and posts. (see more details here)
I consider this a very useful mechanism because a vibrant and organic grown community is formed by as many as possible active and contributing members and also it fully aligns with this forums rules There are a lot of badges you can earn. Who is really interested in the forum rules, and clicked on the previous link, will get one directly, because it distinguishes someone who cares about a good togetherness in the forum.
The motivation of people to actively participate is therefore very important. Without them, we would not be able to see a lot of valuable content. And also the “read only” members, who do not want to participate, would suffer from it and would not visit the forum any more.
Then we can also simply have a noreply mailing list or a telegram announcement channel, where all click the “hail jesus” button when god send some message. But this is not an organic and real decentralized behaviour.
Now to the question if there should be a private section: in my opinion clearly yes. for a certain selection of topics where the trust level system is a good selector for contribution. And as a big motivation for people to get there.