Post History

I want moderators to be able to grant or suspend abilities at fairly granular levels, because sometimes that person who's answered a ton of questions well also has a tendency to make noisy edits or leave rude comments, and I want moderators to be able to take the smallest action that addresses a problem.

As an admin who just yesterday tried to adjust the settings for abilities on a new site... yeah, it's complicated, and I felt like I couldn't express what I wanted.  When deciding whether a user should have an ability, I want the system to be able to take into account two things:
- how many times the user has done the related action
- what the "success" proportion was

If somebody has suggested 100 edits and 3 of them were rejected, I probably don't care -- that's an awful lot of good edits, and everyone makes mistakes occasionally.  Or maybe the edit shouldn't have been rejected.  On the other hand, if someone has suggested *5* edits and 3 of them were rejected, the user probably shouldn't be able to make unreviewed edits just yet.  

So we don't want raw numbers, but percentages alone aren't enough.  I want to be able to express something like "at least 10 suggested edits, and 75% approval".  Pure Wilson scoring doesn't let me express that.

If we had this kind of expressiveness, then I think a lot of the pain points for the current abilities system would decrease or go away.  We have higher (default) thresholds on some things that could be disruptive if unfettered, *but* those higher scores implicitly raise the minimum number of events to overcome a single mistake.

I agree with you (and another answer) that some other factors should contribute too, including age of the account, overall level of activity, and (maybe) activity on other network communities.  Abilities can currently depend on three factors: post scores, number of suggested edits, and number of flags.  I either suggested or advocated for those factors (I don't remember now) and at the time I thought they would be sufficient, but now I don't think they are.

I think what you're proposing that we group what are currently called "abilities" (to be renamed "privileges") into larger buckets called "abilities" (new meaning), so that you could define something like:

```
New user:
  requires: (nothing)
  grants: Daily Posts = 5, Comment on Own Posts

Established user:
  requires:
    account_age: 30d
    non_negative_posts: 10
    suggested_edits: 5
  grants: Edit, Comment Anywhere, Daily Votes = 30
```

And also that we could have specific privilege criteria, that don't have to depend on the broad abilities, like:

```
Edit:
  suggested_edits: 10
  edit_ acceptance_rate: 75%
```

Would this be expressive enough to allow moderators to set the limits that make sense for their communities?  Would it be uncomplicated enough to use?  Would we be able to bake in some sort of validation or advisory feedback if the ability definitions and privilege definitions are inconsistent?