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Possible Duplicate:
Differentiate between employees and moderators

Site Moderators get a little ♦ next to their name to, well, indicate that they're Moderators.

Members of the Stack Overflow team get the same symbol next to their names as well. (I guess if they choose to also moderate that site.)

I think it'd be nice for Team SO to have a different symbol. ♠ perhaps.

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  • Wow, 23 upvotes for the duplicate? I might give this a pity upvote now
    – Michael Mrozek
    Commented Feb 14, 2011 at 15:44
  • Searched. Didn't find. Voting to close.
    – ale
    Commented Feb 14, 2011 at 15:58

2 Answers 2

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Members of the Stack Overflow team used to have stars ★ as their designation. 'Owners' of SE 1.0 sites had double diamonds. ♦♦. The people appointed to moderate by them were single diamond moderators ♦. The single diamond moderator is the only symbol still in use.

The fact that they make them all one diamond keeps there from being a class division between the two. Perhaps it's the team's way of saying that diamond moderators should be trusted by the community as much as the team?

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    I thought the double diamonds were only for 'administrators' of SE 1.0 sites.
    – jjnguy
    Commented Feb 14, 2011 at 15:23
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    I was going to post this exact feature request a while ago, and your second paragraph is the reason I didn't; I decided it's kind of nice that devs look the same as mods, and nearly all users don't even know the distinction
    – Michael Mrozek
    Commented Feb 14, 2011 at 15:24
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    Pretty sure @jjnguy is right. The original symbol for the team was a star, which changed to a diamond shortly after Marc and Bill were elected. I know it was still a star as late as May 2009.
    – mmyers Mod
    Commented Feb 14, 2011 at 15:47
  • @jjnguy you're absolutely right. I'd forgotten about the stars.
    – George Stocker
    Commented Feb 14, 2011 at 16:19
  • @George Stocker, still not quite right. SE 1.0 sites had two different classes of moderator: the two-diamond administrators and the one-diamond moderators, appointed by the administrators. This, I suppose, was because nobody on SE 1.0 sites could set or unset people as moderators just by changing a field in the database. See mathoverflow.net/users?page=1 and mathoverflow.net/users?page=2 for examples.
    – mmyers Mod
    Commented Feb 14, 2011 at 16:24
  • @mmyers thanks for clearing that up; I don't remember seeing single diamond moderators on the SE1.0 sites; but I don't really remember much from back then.
    – George Stocker
    Commented Feb 14, 2011 at 16:28
  • @George, I don't think all SE 1.0 site owners chose to appoint mods, but they did have the option, as proven here. Good answer!
    – Pops
    Commented Feb 14, 2011 at 16:47
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If:

  1. They have different abilities
  2. It's important for users to understand that the action was taken by an Employee specifically (ie, not just a mod, and not just an employee acting as a mod, but a capital E Employee)

The first may be true for some employee/mods (though I doubt that every employee is a mod, nevermind has more access than a mod, though certainly several do).

However, I don't think that the second is true.

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    They do have different abilities, and I think that's the more important point; you need to know if a user is even capable of doing what you ask (e.g. people frequently ask mods to fix meta/main account linking, when mods can't do that; you need a dev). However, the few people that are even aware of the difference probably also know which users are devs and which aren't
    – Michael Mrozek
    Commented Feb 14, 2011 at 15:53
  • @Michael - Not all employees will know how to, or have the ability to, link accounts either.
    – Pollyanna
    Commented Feb 14, 2011 at 19:17

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