About the avatar position on topic list on mobile

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

Hi,

I’ve been using Discourse every day for 3 years and there is a little something that has been bugging me from the very first day.

On the mobile view, when looking at a topic list, the avatar on the left is the avatar of the last user that replied, not the topic author:

And literally every time I open Discourse on mobile, my brain tries to tell me that the avatar on the left is the author avatar. 3 years and I still can’t be used to it.

Sure, we can customize Discourse at will, and @Steven made a cool mobile view that puts the avatar on the right (among other small changes).
I just added it to my forum and I intend to do it for my second forum. It just makes more sense to me.

But I’m just wondering if other people feel the same way about this avatar position (and maybe size?), if it has been discussed and if you plan to change the mobile view in the future (I’m aware that changing the design in such a way can harm many customized Discourse forums).

[craigconstantine]

What if it was the op’s avatar, with a smaller, last poster avatar overlaid offset to, say, the lower-right?

[BhaelOchon (Billy Jo)]

I like this. It would make things a hair more consistent with /latest's column of posters on desktop too, where OP is on the left and last poster is on the right.

What if OP were also the last poster? Would it give them a halo on the left and show the second-last poster’s avatar (if any) on the right, similar to desktop?

[davidkingham]

Agreed 100%, this is one of the first things I changed on my site! It wasn’t just me, my users didn’t like the default behavior of latest avatar either.

A smaller avatar with latest next to OP on mobile makes sense to me as well.

[Falco]

2015 discussion about this so we don’t repeat ourselves

Information Overload - Some insight through qualitative interviews

I think it is unavoidable, unless we show both the avatar of the topic creator as well as the last poster – which would be very busy – we have to pick either Topic creator Last poster I think creator is more problematic because it will stay the same forever, even if there are hundreds of replies over a period of a week it would always be the same avatar displaying. So I agree with @sam on this one it has to be last poster. Last poster is more dynamic and more interesting over time.

Also in 2016

On the mobile theme, the list of posts show's the latest replying user's avatar, not the OP's avatar

This is by design, and has been discussed in other topics. When there is only room for one avatar in the topic list (as in mobile), the last person to talk in that topic is the correct avatar to show for the topic, otherwise a topic with 5000 replies would show the same avatar for months.

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

Sorry about that, I used the search but I obviously didn’t do it properly.
I guess this topic can be closed then.
I don’t really want to see this topic as a “bikeshedding” topic (thanks for Discourse staff for learning me this expression).
I was more wondering in a general way if it was discussed and reviewed enough.