Browsing a long thread - you sometimes forget who was the original topic starter - especially if you return to the topic days after last time you read it and jump into the discussion…
Therefore I request a solution that let you easily see who was the original Thread starter or topic starter…
Eg a icon or something that visualize who did original start this topic…
Might the post avatar already have a class attribute value indicating its a post made by the topic starter? If so a simple CSS declaration with the right selector could do something like add a border radius. It might be more trouble if the change took up too many more pixels of screen real estate. I think that anything that didn’t exceed what the flairs do should be OK.
What does the HTML for a post avatar of the OP look like in your dev tools inspect?