I do not like that fact that the contributions by many people are made to look more important by prominently displaying their status or group affiliation. I am a member of Data Working Group but this is irrelevant to 99% of things I say on this forum, and I have hence disabled this under āTitleā in my preferences. I notice that many others proudly display their affiliation or heightened status - be that āForum Governance Teamā, āGermany Moderatorā, or āLeaderā (wtf?). It makes sense to show these where they are relevant - e.g. if a moderator chooses to step in when someone misbehaves, it can be useful to make it clear that they are doing this in their job as a moderator. But where people participate not in their role but as a private individual, I would like to see peopleās contributions judged on content and not on status or group affiliation.
I propose to encourage everyone to disable the ātitleā setting and only use it where relevant. Alternatively, I propose to disable the concept of publicly visible affiliation altogether, at least where it symbolises heightened status.
For me as a āregularā OSM user it is helpful to know the role a user has in OSM structure. And of course I judge a message about, for example, automatic editing by someone from DWG differently than a message by John Doe. But I donāt think that is a bad thing.
Iām not sure how this is going to work. After all, itās global setting, and the minute you change it, it will become visible or invisible on every single of your posts.
Unless youāre in some kind of moderation role, I personally find them rather silly and would always disable them.
On the general question of āwho is Xā you can always hop over to OSM.org and see their edits, and comments on those edits.
This should work most of the time, though perhaps there are some edge cases (lookalike or non printable characters in some OSM usernames) where it may not.
The āoldā forum also displayed āmoderatorā always on the posts.
It was not that much of a problem there. Still I understand the point Frederik brings up. Sometimes you are speaking as a person having a specific āroleā, but most of the time it is just your personal opinion.
Probably due to UI design of discourse, it looks a bit more āprominentā than before.
I also do not like the way the āmoderatorā shield is rendered along with the title. You could add visually similar elements to the āusernameā field. This could make you look āmore importantā, if that is your desire.
Here a screenshot of how it might look like if you edit your ānameā field. It looks visually very similar to the title added by the forum. Also the shield emoji just slightly differs. Looks important, doesnāt it?
