I was here a year ago when we were mooting the creation of the locked forum. If I remember correctly, there’s no issue with opening the tangential category so the general public can read it, but there’s no way to do it in a read-only format on this platform (Discourse). Back then I wondered to myself if this would lead to perverse incentives (spam posting to move up the ranks). It seems it has.
Thanks for bringing this up–this just might lead to something.
Edit: Turns out the conversation happened 9 months ago–not quite a year.
Found the thread and some relevant posts:
Regarding why there isn’t read-only access to the All Around Qubes subforum:
Some thoughts I had during the subforum’s planning phase:
Here I want to bring up what I wrote at the time, about how “those who participate must have, in a non-trivial way, demonstrated an interest in Qubes and positive contribution to discussions” (emphasis added). A system that judges who’s been naughty and who’s been nice is one that is inherently subjective, but after a year (okay, 9 months) of All Around Qubes, it feels like we’re at a point where we can decide if trying to keep the door open via an automated mechanism is worth it.
I don’t think it is–If we switch from this automated mechanism to one where mods and others manually review those who have reached a certain level periodically (say, once every quarter), noise and spammy behavior motivated by access to the fabled hidden forum gets removed (there’s nothing special going on in there, just in case anyone reading is wondering). As a bonus, we might also improve the quality and quantity of discussion in the All Around Qubes subforum.