Maybe I'm doing something wrong. I see an notification for a new unread reply. I open the unread replies page. I click on 'link' to go to the thread to see the context, and reply if I feel so inclined.

But that notification doesn't go away. The reply that I clicked on and read is still showing as unread. I have to click on "mark as unread" to make the notification go away. However, if I do that before I click through to the thread, the reply disappears and I can't click through to the thread. So I have to go to the thread, read & reply, then go back to my unread replies page to mark the reply as "read".

If I've clicked through to the thread where someone replied to me, then you can safely assume I've read that reply.

The trust system is something that I'm looking forward to for several reasons. It allows for community moderation that is "decentralized" to a point. It takes pressure off of the admins to police content. The possibility of being able to ensure that quality content remains the core product of this site. There are also negatives like the possibility of creating a "power user" class that is resented by the rest of the user base or the potential for misuse by those with the power. Along with some more complex issues such as disagreements between trusted users about how to interpret and curate content. These are all things that we as a community should iron out before a larger scale rollout of this system.

What I wanna talk about today is something a little bit different tho. From my experience with other sites that have achievable user class "upgrades", there will, almost no matter what the precautions put in place, be users that will game the system to rise up through the ranks as quickly as possible. From my point of view, as long as there is a system, written or not, about what needs to be done to achieve the "Trusted" status, there will be users that will do their best to get their as quickly as possible. There are a few ways that this can be looked at:

• It's fine because while they may not be contributing for the "right" reasons, they are still acting in what is seen as a positive manner in the community.
• Concern that because they are only working towards the status symbol "Trusted" that they are not going to be acting in the best interests of the website, but in the interests of keeping the status.
• Wanting to keep this kind of behavior to an absolute minimum because want everything should be as ideal as possible.

While this discussion is had on a fairly regular basis, the consensus seems to be that it is a necessary evil to endure because it would be both too much work to police/figure out who is acting for the right reasons (even standardizing what the "right reasons" are is hard).

The way this can be combated by having requirements that would be deemed too much work for most of the people who are just in it for the status and not for the site. The issue with this solution is that it can make it very difficult for those who truly care about the site to maintain the position that allows them to curate and keep the site in the condition that we aim for.

In the end I think that the deteriorating system will solve at least a portion of these problems because those who are just in it for the status symbol are often likely to quit trying after they are achieve the goal they want. This leads to periods of inactivity, and therefore, decay.

I wanted to post this to see what the greater community had to think about this.

Automatically* dammit auto-correct!

I often use the notifications to reply to comments directly, opening the context link in another tab if needed. I after replying I have to explicitly 'Mark as read'. I think it makes sense to automatically mark a notification as read when replying to it.

If this is a common use I will happily create an issue for it on GitLab.

Other people can tag my posts as jokes, but I can't. Is there a good reason for this to be the case? Obviously I'm not going to tag my posts as Noise, Troll, or Flame, but Joke and Offtopic aren't necessarily negative.