New: User Trust Levels — Earn Points, Get Your Pastes Seen
New: user trust levels are live — a simple way the site recognizes genuine, active members, and one that directly affects whether your public pastes get seen by other people.
How trust levels work
Every account earns reputation points through real engagement. Points accumulate into a trust level automatically — there's nothing to apply for, nothing to request. Just use the site.
How to earn points
- Posting on the forum — starting a new thread earns 5 points, replying earns 3. Capped at 15 points/day from posting, so it rewards genuine discussion, not a flood of one-word replies.
- People finding your pastes useful — every genuinely new visitor who views one of your public pastes earns you 1 point. Repeat views from the same visitor don't stack, and viewing your own paste doesn't count — this is meant to reflect real usefulness to other people, not something you can inflate yourself.
- Logging in — 2 points per day, once per day, just for showing up.
What trust level actually unlocks
Right now, trust level gates one specific thing: whether your public pastes are eligible to show up as Related Pastes on howtos and hardware pages, or in the public tag directory. Reach Trust Level 1 and your public pastes become eligible for discovery site-wide.
Your pastes can still be created as Public and visited by anyone with the link at any trust level — this only affects whether they get surfaced automatically elsewhere on the site.
Getting to Level 1 is genuinely easy if you're an active member — a couple of real forum replies over a day or two, or a paste that a handful of people actually find useful, is enough. It's not meant to be a grind; it's meant to filter out throwaway accounts posting once and disappearing.
Why this exists
Public pastes are shown right alongside official content on howto and hardware pages. This threshold makes sure that space stays meaningful — reflecting people who are actually part of this community, not a brand-new account's first, untested submission.