I often see people mix up these terms, which is confusing.
This forum has something called the
Trust system. It consists of two somewhat-separate components:
trust ratings and
trust lists. You can give people trust ratings, which are little comments about their trustworthiness. How these ratings are displayed is affected by each reader's trust list, so each reader sees different trust ratings. Trust ratings do not affect trust lists.
Your
trust list is the list
here. It is the list of users who you directly trust. Your
trust network is everyone whose rating you see as trusted. Your trust network consists of people on your trust list plus people they trust, plus people they trust, etc., going down to a depth determined by your configured trust depth. (A depth of 0 is just the people on your trust list.)
DefaultTrust is the name of a forum account that you trust when your trust list is empty. The
default trust list is this user's trust list. The
default trust network is the set of users whose ratings show up as trusted when you trust only DefaultTrust and your trust depth is set to the default 2.
If you took every forum user and drew them as a circle on a huge sheet of paper, and then drew lines from each circle for every person on that user's trust list, with the lines going to the circles corresponding to the trusted users, then the resulting graph would be the
global trust graph.
A
chain of trust is a path within the global trust graph to you from some user which causes the user to be included in your trust network. For example, if user test123 trusts DefaultTrust directly, then there is a chain of trust from BCB to test123 like this: BCB <- BadBear <- DefaultTrust <- test123. There can be many chains of trust connecting two users. In this case, it can be said that BCB is in test123's trust network
via BadBear and DefaultTrust. You can figure out how a user got into your trust network by looking at the
hierarchical trust view.
If someone is in your trust network who you want removed, there are three things you can do:
- Remove all users from your trust list who exist in chains of trust from that user to you. If you wanted to remove BCB in the example above, you could remove DefaultTrust.
- Complain to the people closest to the user in chains of trust from that user to you. If they refuse to remove the user, go up the chain. In the BCB example, you could complain to BadBear, and if he refuses, complain to DefaultTrust. (Though for issues with DefaultTrust, you should actually post to Meta.)
- Explicitly untrust the user by adding them to your trust list with their username prefixed with a ~. In the BCB example, add
~BCB to your trust list.