What is the best practice for displaying user's Authority, "flair" or "role" in the forum?

UX
1

How to add some kind of Badge next to the person’s name to visitors can see that person has authority in the forum?
I have a forum for a product where we have product Developers, Testers, product Founder.
Just want to have “Developer” or “creator” “Tester” written next to the person’s name in their posts or replies. So visitors can easily see that the parson has authority and their answer can be trusted.

  • Badges do not seem not appear next to the name. Also badges seem to be geared towards being issued automatically.
  • Groups problem #1: Group name next to person’s name is written in light-gray text color. Which makes it look very unimportant. Definitely does not make visitor see that the person posting has authority.
  • Groups problem #2: Let’s say we have product founder. So there should be “Founder” group just for that one person? Shouldn’t it be like a role or badge for this?

Even looking at meta.discourse forum it’s not easy to understand when the person has authority or some random visitor posting. And when there’s grey text next to the person’s name sometime it looks like a group, sometimes it’s like group but you can’t see that group, it’s something else?

What is the best practice for this?

2 Likes
2

I maintain a group called “Crew Member”. I assign access to this group to our crew members. Also this group is public.

You are asking something like quora bio right? I get it.

3

I raised this with the Discourse team recently. Clarification of role, and therefore the ability to weight responses, would be very helpful.

1 Like
4

You can make the user title stand out more by styling this CSS:

.topic-meta-data .user-title { }

In the Customize section of the admin panel.
However, this styling applies to all user titles. There no way (AFAIK) to style each group differently.

This has overlap with https://meta.discourse.org/t/egocentric-features/18521

2 Likes
5

If you use groups, you can also use a bit of CSS to add a label to the post metadata:

Pasted image946×157 25.7 KB

Here is the CSS I used:

.topic-meta-data .username.staff::after {
    content: "Team";
    margin-left: 0.6em;
    background-color: #5bc0de;
    border-radius: 0.40em;
    padding: .2em .6em .3em;
    color: white;
}
6 Likes
6

Ah yes, you can add specific styling for the system user groups “admin” and “moderators” but not any of your own.

7

Custom groups are addressable as well:

Pasted image1126×82 19 KB

1 Like
8

Oh my. I could have sworn that wasn’t there last time I checked :blush:

EDIT: Ah yes it’s only for the Primary usergroup. Ideally, it’d list all the groups that user belongs to.

2 Likes
9

That could be a very long list in some communities…

1 Like
10

No doubt. Still, it’s something I’d like to be able to do, somehow…

11

Thank you, that is nice and simple way to do it!