I like the /about page, and appreciate it being simple and transparent about the running and activity of a discourse site. However, on our site we have decided not to give anyone who logs in every day admin access and instead have created one admin user account that is shared by our team to log in and perform admin actions. So that account should be hidden from view everywhere in fact - not just on the about page but in badge listings etc. An option (on the admin page for users? on the preferences page?) to hide/show this would be really nice.
Meanwhile the list of moderators would look better with real names of the moderators rather than their usernames, along with link to the user profile as it exists now. So an admin setting to switch this would be appreciated. (This is generally true - would prefer to see real names to usernames even on badge listings so maybe this could be a sitewide toggle?)
That seems really weird. How do you hold anyone accountable then? How do you know who was logged in last as the only admin? What do you do if someone were to change the admin password and not share it? Or if someone gets hacked and they take over the admin account?
That’s a lot of risk with little reward.
I could support this feature if it used the “use real names” setting in the Admin area. If that setting isn’t set, then the username should remain present.
As an aside, I think this should be two separate requests, as the need for them do not align with each other and obviously a lot of discussion could be had on how you setup your admin account…
Sorry for combining what ended up as two separate requests into one topic. For me they are both related to the presentation of staff on the about page.
I don’t disagree - it’s weird and I wish we didn’t have to do it. But we have no choice because we have private categories that admins shouldn’t see on a regular basis and there is no way to full-on hide those discussions from ourselves. So even we admins (there are two of us) only have moderator privileges which we use most of the time and then log in as the admin user to do site upgrades, manage settings and otherwise do stuff that we can’t do as moderators.
As I write these words, the idea comes to me that perhaps some sort of “sudo” would be nice - e.g. unlock the admin options by typing in your password again?
Ah yes this makes sense and I would like that. If Real Names is set on the admin area, then show real names instead of usernames everywhere including the about page.
Okay, so I’m a bit confused, so please bear with me.
They trust the both of you enough to be admins.
They don’t want you to look inside a specific category?
Why? Either they trust you, or they don’t. They do realize you could simply login as the Admin daily and peek into that category daily right? So why can’t you simply be an admin daily?
Or is it that you feel you can’t be responsible enough to stay out of a category (you technically have access to)? (don’t take this personal, it really is the only alternative I can think of)
I just don’t understand the thought behind the decisions that were made. I know there is probably nothing I can say that would alter the decisions that were made, but I’d like to grasp it better to see if it is really something that would be common among other forums.
I think the sudo analogy works best. We don’t need to or want to see the stuff in those categories on a daily basis, but we are trusted with it as needed. It’s sensitive discussions around staffing, salaries, budgeting etc that can be hairy at times and is none of my business. So if it shows up randomly in search results for me or in the latest topics, it can be a problem.
On the other hand, you are right - this is odd and worthy of revisiting. Perhaps the thing to do here is to move those discussions elsewhere, to email or back to the google group from whence it came.
Yeah, I saw that - I would prefer to have only real names, no usernames, on the about page. But this is already great progress - I having ABOUT on the menu!
Any chance this can be fixed so only names show on the about page, without username in parentheses? It has formatting/layout issues, and on my sites is redundant because we use real names as usernames.
Okay, I’m confused on this comment from @sam on the PR
[quote]this is a big packet of styling changes for something so small.
also I do not think we need any conditional logic here, just show full name there regardless and the “title” / “username” / “name” should be styled the same way it is on the posts, black for everything is confusing.[/quote]
The bold part (emphasis mine), is what concerns me. We have Real Names disabled and DO NOT want it to show the real names of our staff (especially since we have no way to alter our “real names” because disabling the feature removes the ability to edit them – without resorting to the ruby console).
The if condition is not required because if the names are disabled they will not be passed along hence user.name will be null and nothing will be shown, hence “just show full name there regardless”.
Thanks for the explanation. I figured it was covered, as it would have gone against the norm, but I wanted to make sure and haven’t had a chance to start up my Discourse VM yet today
Thanks, Michael! I thought I was alone in this thinking.
I am aware and understand implicitly that most discourse implementations are part of the forum tradition in which people invent cool usernames/aliases for themselves. In this case (like on meta) it is actually pretty important to feature both username and real name. And it looks awesome.
This causes me some trouble, however, because I am trying to bring the power of discourse to people who are supremely confused by forums and arcane forum features. So it’s about gently nudging them. So having the about page (which we want to use and point people to actively) just show the picture, name and title of admins and moderators would be a big help.
having ABOUT on the menu!
