Good morning everyone! So, this is what I get for pushing buttons at midnight and going to sleep 
To explain a bit about what’s going on: Discourse (this forum software) offers a lot of tools and power which we haven’t been making use of. I’ve been talking about experimenting with taking us back a bit closer to the default recommended settings to see how things will go. This means enabling certain things like trust-levels and placing a limit on likes.
I will admit I didn’t intend to open the floodgates last night, apparently tweaked the wrong setting which enabled you guys to jump up in trust levels really quick. While this wasn’t intended to happen just yet I may just leave it for a while and see how things go, spinning dials as necessary and stressing out the ISD staff.
So, a few points from the above discussion.
Likes: Likes are intended to be limited and highlight that content which you feel is valuable. I may have spun the dial on this a little too low and the cap can be tweaked. Part of the reason likes are limited is because they factor into trust level rankings, so your rank needs to be properly earned by making quality comments (as much fun as the like and get likes thread is). We’re not going to police how you guys use likes, but there will be a cap to keep in mind. Higher trust levels get access to more daily likes than lower trust levels. It’s actually been a consideration to potentially wipe all old likes from the system to start fresh with this in mind which may or may not happen at this point.
Wiki: I’ve turned this off for now - I’m interested in hearing discussion if you think such a feature would be valuable. What this does is allow high trust users to make their post a Wiki which can be editable by anyone who’s at trust level 1 or higher (can be changed). I’m not sure it was obvious enough what was going on with this however which is why I’ve turned it off.
Badges: Some new badges are popping up. These are default ones that simply had never been enabled, I’ve turned them on simply because they looked like fun. Not a bug, just some freshly enabled default badges which had been turned off.
As far as all of this and forum settings go I’m happy to hear feedback. This may wind up being only a time limited experiment or perhaps we’ll keep some parts and not others - but I think there may be some value in trying new things here and myself and the ISDs will keep a close eye on emerging issues so we can hop on those as they pop up. If anyone at a high trust level wants to abuse the system we will just lock you down to trust level 1 and you’ll lose the ability to climb the ranks again.