Lurking for two months before posting: was that the right call?

Off-topic posts that do not belong here belong in the Lounge instead. You are not in trouble if a moderator moves your post — they are just routing it to the right place so people who want to read it can find it.

The compound and evidence pages are updated regularly and they are worth reading when you are new. They answer the meta questions like "do we have data on this" and "what do the trials actually show" before you ask them.

The Lounge is a real category rather than a dumping ground. The sourcing rule still applies there, which surprises people, but the register is looser and nobody minds a digression.

Welcome. Two practical notes from staff. Your first few posts are rate-limited, which is an anti-spam measure and not a comment on you, and it lifts on its own. If you hit it and have something to add, edit the post you already made.

If anyone has run this properly I would rather read that than my own guess.

The Lounge is a real category rather than a dumping ground. The sourcing rule still applies there, which surprises people, but the register is looser and nobody minds a digression.

Adding it because I spent an afternoon working it out and nobody should have to twice.

Reading counts toward trust level, so lurking is not wasted. That is unusual and it is the reason the levels here track familiarity rather than volume.

The claim is narrower than it sounds, and deliberately so.

Trust levels accumulate over time and they give you access to small things like the ability to edit your own posts without a timestamp. They are not a status symbol and they do not make you more right. Someone at trust level zero with a good question gets better answers than someone at trust level four with a bad one.

Someone will know this better than I do and I hope they say so.

Clear enough that I do not think I have a follow-up, which is unusual.

The Lounge is a real category rather than a dumping ground. The sourcing rule still applies there, which surprises people, but the register is looser and nobody minds a digression.

That is my reading. Someone else read the same page differently and was reasonable.

Worth knowing early: the archive is not retrospectively corrected. A topic from two years ago was accurate when written and may not be now. Every post carries its date for that reason.

Worth checking against a second source before it gets quoted onward.

Introducing yourself is fine and requires no question. Post in this subcategory, describe the context that matters for why you are here, and lurk for a bit before posting technical questions. That order works well.

You do not need to introduce yourself before asking a question, and nobody will think worse of you for arriving with one. The introductions subcategory exists for people who want it, not as a gate.

If you are not sure which subcategory a question belongs in, post it in the closest one. A moderator will move it, the move is logged, and nothing bad happens to you.

Posting it because the silence on this was starting to look like agreement.

Sensible. I would want the same detail before I acted on it either.

Reading the guidelines before you post is genuinely worth the twenty minutes. Not because you will break one, but because the rules explain why the place reads the way it does.

The right answer here may simply be that it has not been measured.