Add an immediately visible indication that a user is a staff member or an employee of SE

Question

With the recent change in the moderator privilege distribution among staff members, not everyone gets an immediately visible diamond symbol next to their name.

Hovering over a user card is not the best solution. Not everyone knows that this feature exists, and sometimes employees don't fill out their descriptions, there's gotta be a better way.

I think this might be a good time to think of a new visual indicator, perhaps something like the "New contributor" undersign, but which says "Staff, {job title}", or just the title, like so:

Answer 1

What do you think about this SVG icon? I think it's pretty great and self-explanatory or at least much easier to guess what it means rather than another geometric shape:

(credit to this answer on basically the same issue)

Answer 2

I don't see why it is relevant to know that someone is staff if they're just acting as a normal user (asking or answering questions on a non-meta site). However, it is indeed very useful to know someone is a staff member when they're acting in an official capacity and answering or posting company messages on meta sites (including, but not limited to this one).

So maybe just have this for meta?

As for the actual job title, that isn't really necessary. What we need to know is that this person is acting in some official capacity, that they're posting as company representatives. I don't think it's so important to know if they're a "Community Evangelist" or a "Director of Public Q&A" or whatever. Half the time, the titles are completely opaque to us anyway (I have no idea what a community evangelist is, for example). When relevant, such as when the CEO or CPO post very official announcements, they can mention their role in the post itself.

But yes, a simple visual indicator that someone is staff would be very useful on meta sites, absolutely.

Answer 3

This is now live. Please post all further feedback/bug reports/requests as answers to this post

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We are going to be addressing this in the very near future, employing the new user card badges that were just released in Stacks to decorate staff and mod display names on Meta sites.

When this change goes live, on all Meta sites (including MSE):

1. Mod diamonds will be replaced by the new Mod badge (which includes a diamond). These badges will all start out in blue (as shown in the screenshots here), but could change color in the future to match color themes on sites if/when these are modified.
2. Staff badges will follow the user's display name anywhere on the site where the name is shown. This includes question listings, user profile, author/modified boxes on questions and answers, comments, timeline/user history, post notices, (and many more places). The badge will be Stack Overflow Orange on all sites.

Here is how it will look in the Users listing:

And here is a sample from some comments:

The new mod badges will not yet be included on Main sites (or anywhere on Chat or the main StackExchange.com site) where for the time being, the good old unaddorned mod diamond will live on. And there are no plans to show staff labels on Main sites aside from the profile page.

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Cruising on Meta
"Who is that user?", she thought
Check out 'dem badges

Answer 4

It could be beneficial if staff members could "distinguish" a post of theirs, comment or otherwise, and either give themselves an orange diamond (the color coinciding with the flair given to their profiles from this change), or simply add that Staff flair (in a smaller capacity than I display it below) to the end of their name for that post specifically.

Mock-up example:

It could be activated simply by clicking a checkbox when posting, similar to how you post as Community wiki, or with one of their many mod tools.

Staff members don't always have to act in an official capacity. Granting this on a post-by-post basis (primarily to be used on meta, I imagine) would be largely beneficial for clarity, while having the added effect of not being quite so in-your-face on other posts.

If you wanted to get really fancy, you could make the mouse hover text their job title.

Answer 5

First of all, here's my proposed markup for this. I think that this is lightweight (not taking up much space) compared to Spevacus's proposed markup, and is much easier to identify compared to the one proposed in user1306322's answer. It also helps better align with SE's brand guidelines. Here's how it would like for moderators:

...and for non-moderators:

Here's the HTML I used to create that box:

<span title="staff" class="bg-orange-400" style="border-radius:3px;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span>

Second, while I'm all for this indicator for the reasons put forth in the question, I do have one concern. The moderator diamond is applied to all places where the moderator's name is linked, even those that were made back when the user was not a moderator. This isn't that much of an issue, because 1. there's enough context, 2. they're still a volunteer and still acting in that capacity whether they're a moderator or not, and 3. new moderators are (usually) asked in questionnaires regarding their thoughts about a diamond being visible on all their prior contributions.

For staff, however, making it behave like the moderator diamond would be inappropriate. For once, many staff members have previously served as volunteers, and have made opinions on meta sites that are inconsistent with the current team consensus. I've seen at least one case where a staff member posted a comment in support of a feature request back before getting employed, only to later on decline that request. Additionally, it gets confusing to see posts written back when one was a staff member, only to get confused upon them not having the staff indicator (they're former staff).

Finally, even on meta sites and even if the user is a current employee, it can get confusing whether a user is acting in official capacity or as a volunteer (not only for posts, but also for moderator actions if a staff member is moderating a site through their spare time through their staff rights). (Wikipedia resolved this issue by having staff have separate work and non-work accounts: the work accounts would have "(WMF)" in the name and would be entitled to all staff rights, while the non-work accounts would be treated in the same way as other normal users.)

I'm therefore in support of Spevacus's proposed feature to allow staff to manually apply this indicator to given posts, but I'd also like to add one more thing: that this indicator also remain visible on posts made by former staff members if it was added at the time of posting. Also, the markup of the actual indicator should be per the mockups above.

Answer 6

A few little ruminations on this

• These sort of indicators have always been a simple unicode symbol. Historically some CM type folks (Team Chaos)had a greek letter phi

• Hopefully the symbol wouldn't be overloaded (so the admin tag for teams and its hexagon would be a no go).

• SVG sounds interesting, and might give more options. Might also be harder to forge but its inconsistant with how we've reflected status in the past (hmm Shiner mod diamonds? :D ) .

• having it optional/independant of mod-like powers sounds good, especially if someone kinda just wants to hang out on, say Seasoned Advice.

Answer 7

I really hope this gets implemented soon.

In addition to what the OP mentioned that not everyone knows about the "hovering over user card" feature, sometimes, the only interaction with staff members is in the comments where there's no way of knowing that it's a staff member without visiting their profile.

I just encountered this myself when a user left a comment on my answer and I replied to them just like any regular user completely missing the fact that they are a staff member. It wasn't until they said "looking into this now" that I realized they were actually an employee.

Literally, any kind of indicator would be much much better than nothing. I think the suggestion in @user1306322's answer is pretty clear and simple. We don't necessarily need additional information (position, etc.) as it can be found in the user's profile.