Hi folks,
stupid question, because I don’t remember that from “the olden days” (could be my memory) - it seems like every post I make is waiting for approval before it makes its way into the forums. Difficult if the discussion is going quickly…
I understand the need for this before you’ve earned your merits. My question is: Will I be allowed to directly post in the future, or is the approval process perpetual for everyone?
thanks for hints or pointers!
Elmar.
That’s something I have never encountered. Maybe something new? @Jenny @Carla ?
But I’m an old witch
Well yeah, I took a hiatus 
And you have “Regular” next to your name, so I’ll keep on posting 'til that shows up…
Maybe the system needs a bit of time to figure out that you’re a human and not a bot, or something daft like that!
Have you been naughty? 
…nothing I would admit here… 
The “regular” is an optional title that will appear as a drop down choice in your forum profile. I don’t know what the criteria is. I just found it and decided to be an unregular regular. 
I was also on hiatus from the Forum and when I returned and made a post, it would not go through immediately. I believe it took me a couple of days for my posts to go through immediately.
I suppose I had earned some sort of trust / merit badge.
Good to know Sharon - I’ll be patient and wait until it gets too tedious for the staff
If you’ve not posted in awhile, the forum software that THS uses will require you to re-earn trust, including the ability to post without being reviewed. Not specific to any one person — that’s just how the software works. It could happen to any of us if we were absent for long.
Typically, for context, this sort of thing happens based on security concerns. Like forums don’t want anyone digging up or hacking old accounts and mis-using them for spam or such.
Moderators can decide to put certain individuals on monitoring if they’ve say broken terms of use. But that’s separate from cases of users who’ve been absent for long stretches having to re-earn trust.
For people who’ve violated terms and are under watch, they can cross too many lines and be booted off forums. That’s standard practice in many groups or forums. No one has the right to post whatever they want on what’s essentially a private digital property. Typical business interests.
Before I went on hiatus, there was one particular person who always had something negative to say. And then I did not “see” this person on the forum for a while. Perhaps that person had been “under watch and was booted off” or warned and just left the forum entirely.
And some time ago, posts were moderated more stringently than they are now. If something was said that was rude, mean spirited, or disrespectful on a thread, then the thread would be closed in the blink of an eye.
Thanks for the continual feedback
So… to close the loop myself, here’s the official explanation 
If you’re on trust level 3 / Regular you can loose that level if you don’t fullfill the requirements on a regular basis:
«All of the above criteria must be true to achieve trust level 3. Furthermore, unlike other trust levels, you can lose trust level 3 status . If you dip below these requirements in the last 100 days, you will be demoted back to Member.
https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/
Hello everyone,
I can see that @elmi4711 has come back to close the loop with the Discourse blog about Trust Levels (thank you!) - the article shared is the right answer! Hopefully you’ll hit that increased Trust Level soon and won’t have to wait for us to approve your posts.
There are very occasional instances where there might be another reason, but if that was the case, we would normally send a DM to the poster to let the member know what was going on.
Thank you to everyone who has popped on to clarify how things work, it’s really appreciated
Jenny