What is the use of trust depth?
What value I need to set when I am making a custom trust list?
I was confused as you are yesterday when I decide to customize my trust list and asked same question and got this
answer You'll have to read this thread I'm quoting and take note of the highlighted areas
You may wonder why there's no list of users there, as I've explained above, but rather a single entry called "DefaultTrust".
DefaultTrust is a special user who maintains his own Trust List.
The Trust List of DefaultTrust includes the names of those preset users I've talked about.
Beneath the list, there's a value called "Depth". This value represents the number of "steps down" which the forum's software will look into Trust Lists of people in your own Trust List, to construct your final, complete list.
Now, to set up your own Trust List, you might not want to create one from scratch.
To create a list based on other users' judgements, you may just include other users' Feedback by including their names into your own Trust List and set Depth to 1.
If you believe that the people in your Trust List not only leave valuable Feedback, but also maintain good Trust Lists themselves, feel free to set Depth to 2.
I advise against higher values for Depth. That will lead to a final Trust List that includes an enormous number of people.
If you're convinced of a specific user's "bad judgment", you may simply include their name with the prefix "~".
Away with his Feedback and his Trust List, no matter how many people have included him or her.
In the extreme case where you don't want to trust anyone's judgment but your own, you may just want to include the single entry "~DefaultTrust", with a Depth of 0, preferably.
Depth 0 means that you will only take into account the Feedback of the users in your Trust List, but not their Trust Lists.
DefaultTrust doesn't leave Feedback of his own, by the way, so you might as well keep DefaultTrust without the "~" at Depth 0.