I was not sure if this would be most appropriate to post in Forum, non-technical question or the manjaro.org category, so please feel free to move if needed.
Today the certificate for manjaro.org expired and it was reported in the “manjaro.org” category. About two hours later, the topic was merged into another topic, closed and unlisted. The other topic which this was merged into also does not exist. See screenshots below for reference.
I realize the certificate was renewed shortly after, but my question is why such topics are being closed and hidden, or if this was indeed intended? To my knowledge it’s not the first time a manjaro certificate expired and it was also reported over on reddit today as well, so what is the point of unlisting these topics?
As a related question: why do these certificate expirations keep happening? Those are Let’s Encrypt certs which should be easy enough to automatically renew - what is being done to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future? I think it’s important to comment on this since it can be confusing, if not unsettling, for average users to encounter certificate errors on the website of the very distro they use, meaning it’s often the default homepage.
The other topic does exist, but it sits in the Member Hub, and as a Basic User (TL1) you do not have access to that yet — you need to be a Member (TL2).
Discourse Trust Levels advance over time, depending on one’s activity on the forum. According to the forum engine itself, your last post before this one was 3 years ago.
Therefore, the fact that you cannot see the merged topic is simply due to your lack of activity on the forum.
Nothing was deleted or unlisted.
The process is supposed to be automated, but for some reason this has failed. I don’t have any details about the why behind the failure either.
I know it’s annoying — we are painfully aware of that, as well as equally painfully regarding the (usual) hate fest over at Reddit — but all I can say is that the person responsible has been alerted already. We did that as soon as we noticed the problem.
Thank you for the explanation - tbh I forgot the trust-level system exists but this makes more sense then.
May I suggest that, for topics that are beyond a user’s trust level, an appropriate hint is included in the error message? E.g. “Oops! That page doesn’t exist, is private, or is only accessible to trusted users.”?
I just looked at the topic, saw “unlisted” in the activity feed and then saw “that page doesn’t exist or is private” for the linked topic, which made me think that topic had also been unlisted. Unless I’m missing something, there’s no way to see that the trust level is the reason a topic cannot be accessed.
Discourse doesn’t advertise features, sections etc. until one has the necessary trust levels, as far as I’m aware. This makes sense, when you think about it.
