Icon next to username on topics?

feature
1

I see on the Discourse Meta site that the co-founders have an icon (moderator shield) next to their name. Is this something that can be configured in badges or some other location?

We are trying to figure out how to provide more visible recognition to our users who achieve different badges / levels of participation in the community, without having to visit their profile. We believe this can help provide better gamification, because reaching different levels would have more meaning.

On other communities, we’ve seen things like displaying ranks, registration date, number of posts, number of likes, etc, directly on the topic page. I can understand that this can get a bit clunky, but perhaps there are some things that could be considered as a plugin or an option.

2

The moderator shield is based on staff account, specifically moderator. Hovering your mouse over it (if you have one) should explain it as well.

3

One version of what you’re after is explained here:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/interested-in-setting-up-staff-avatar-badges-a-la-twitter-community/35070/12?u=erlend_sh

Sketchfab on the other hand adds a purdy custom title like so:

Screen Shot 2015-12-01 at 20.43.39.png1008×262 33.8 KB

That’s not a styling trick we’ve documented afaik. Feel free to pop on over there and ask them :wink:

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4

Thanks @erlend_sh for the details.

@codinghorror I think I’m getting the hang of groups and how they can be used to apply a class to the username on the topic. That should help me achieve what I’m looking to do.

Here’s the piece I’d like to figure out. Is there a way I can have people dynamically assigned to groups based on achieving certain badge? or a separate query?

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5

No real way of doing this but a great idea for a feature, we could formalize what we do for the trust_level groups and extend it to other badges if you wish. As it stands only way of doing that is with a plugin.

Another option would be to extend groups to allow them to be dynamically defined based on a query, which is also fairly flexible.

I like the idea here, but its a bit of work and you would need a plugin if you wanted the feature right now.

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6

Not an urgent request, though I think it really will help motivate users.

I just wanted to get the discussion going in the Discourse community so we could think about this. This would ultimately be introducing the concept of ranks to the platform. Meaning that the groups would need to be able to be ordered.

@sam I think the idea of extending groups to be based on a query would work perfectly.

Just as an example of how I would use it…

Here are the principal variables I would want to look at:
Registration date, Number of likes received, Number of new topics, Number of topics read, Number of replies

I would then probably have groups like:
Junior Member
Member
Loyal contributor
Silver
Gold
Platinum

Would have to flush it out further, and I appreciate you guys engaging in this discussion.

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