I think there is some benefit in having a beginner tag so others can help them orient themself. But the other levels are too subjective to have any valid uses other than enabling some form of classism.
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Or we all say we’re intermediate. Fuck the system! 
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Jonah coming back to the forum a few hours after making the change:
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Out of curiousity, are the mods/team able to mark their own answers as solutions? And do they count towards the badge count?
Because I’ll be honest, that’s giving rather Kim Il Sung vibes 
My first instinct was more levels but the more that I think about it, I think you are right that a binary where you can either self-identify as a ‘beginner’ or not does seem like it might be better. (Maybe Jin Yang was on to something)
It’d let actual beginners, seeking beginner oriented help and advice to signal that preference, allow us to better serve less technical or new-to-the-privacy-space users, but avoid most of the downsides and ambiguity and perceived authority of the higher designations we’ve been discussing.
I think this would have value, in large part because @anon39279085 said in another thread, while there was a lot of overlap in topics and content between this forum and techlore, Techlore’s community was generally a lot more beginner focused and beginner friendly, and assumed less pre-existing knowledge than discussions on this forum tend to assume.
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I am not sure if it would work out, I think most people don’t check people’s profile before responding.
For your idea to work, I think it would require a highly visible tag (like the badge thing) so people has a higher chance spotting it and respond accordingly.
However, if a user is able to adjust the technical level of the response according to OP’s “beginner” tag, there is a very high chance that user is also capable to spot OP’s technical level and and willing to respond appropriately, even without the “beginner” tag.
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I am still not sure if there is any solution where I would say this needs to be mandatory for users when they create their forum account.
The issue of expertise level being mandatory was why I made this post more so then anything else.
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Don’t know what this is, but I like being Advanced.
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+1 to everyone saying it’s useless.
There’s already a system which works well. The badges that shows “respected” for instance or the official badge if someone is associated with a project like SkewedZeppelin DivestOS or ignoramous RethinkDNS in this thread, are already signs that they know more then the average users.
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I don’t think this is necessary at all. We don’t need to label people as beginner in order to realize that they need extra help and more explaining than usual. They are also free to communicate to us that they are new to this space, which is usually the case anyway.
There’s already days visited and read time to indicate activity. And even then, activity on the forum doesn’t equate at all to level of expertise. I don’t see how gamifying forum activity helps distinguish expertise. If anything, it’s community reputation-building like the leaderboard.
Neither is how you measure expertise. If anything, measuring expertise has to be manual process.
100%
The premise is that we need to distinguish between varying levels of expertise in order to make Privacy Guides more approachable? Is there evidence that the forum is driving people away with its supposedly “high level” of advice?
Let’s suppose that there is. OK. But would adding a “beginner” label to the forum suddenly stop forum users from recommending Pixels and GrapheneOS?
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Someone else already said this, but I’m also disappointed in the fact that there was no official announcement about this being implemented. Nor was there any official input from the community. It was discussed off-topicly on a post about Techlore’s forum being shut down.
This isn’t to say that I think we need official community input for all changes to the forum. But this specific feature needs input since it’s clearly contentious, as evidenced from this very post. It also strikingly changes how people use the forum since it outright prevents people from interacting with the community.
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This is a Discourse feature dropped on us because of an update, right?
I mean I am an expert but not really in this field privacy and security field. I like to think I am but I am not really sure. I know a lot of people here know more than me so…
Yeah. Im going to put myself in the mid, just because.
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Community members are intended to read this field on other people’s profiles to determine how complex or summarized your reply to a person can be. We will not be giving any benefits to people who choose a higher level of experience, and it is not particularly intended to indicate anything about a person’s own replies. It is primarily an indication to others how you wish to be treated in a conversation. I expect many current community members would choose intermediate.
More information: Welcoming beginners to the privacy community
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Yes. This is essentially an anti-trust-level indicator because currently we have no way to indicate you are new or want more assistance. Prior to now we only had ways to indicate some level of expertise through trust levels, badges, etc.
This is why if you choose beginner you can get a Beginner title next to your name on posts, but the same is not true for the other levels. Beginner is the only level which actually grants you any new features on the forum. If you are a non-beginner we would continue to expect you to earn badges with activity or contact the team for a developer/verified badge.
They/we can, although you’ll note if you go to any question that’s solved on the forum it does say who marked the answer as the solution. We frequently mark our own posts and non-team-members’s posts as solutions on behalf of the OP, simply because people forget to mark correct solutions themselves. So I do believe the answer counts are still relatively accurate.
We specifically do not want to do this 
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Oh, bravo! What an incredible forum on privacy—truly the peak of freedom! Do you dare to refuse or skip? Please, as if your tiny little autonomy is important when Privacy herself sweetly forces you to play along. Bow down and contribute, you ingrate, or we’ll all descend into chaos because you couldn’t be bothered. Compliance is not an option, peasants—it is your holy duty to this charade!
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I will delete my account here immediately.
Please check and help me permanently delete it if I make any mistakes during the process.
Thanks.
Thanks for the response @jonah maybe I missed it but can you clarify why this needs to be mandatory?
I respect the decision and appreciate @everyone giving their two cents.
Where is my “Astute Reader” tag?!!
just found my new profile bio
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This is disgusting. When I saw the warning, I linked it to the last comment (where I suggested that the privacy tool could be used by criminals): I thought someone had disliked my comment and reported me, which is why I received this warning. That warning, by the way, required me to provide my residential address, place of work, and full date of birth. After that, I thought the site was controlled by the US government and I should delete my account. I had already made up my mind, but I stumbled upon this thread by chance.
what?
Can you provide a screenshot (obviously without your personal details) showing what you believe you saw?