Show former-staff status on profile

[azurelunatic]

Title:
Show former-staff status on profile

Area:
account types, business

Summary:
If a staff account becomes no longer a staff account for any reason, acknowledge the former status in the account profile.

Description:
This isn't yet an issue, so I thought I'd suggest it while it still isn't. As we know, staff accounts are issued to staff to make authoritative statements in official venues. Once upon a time Denise expressed a preference that in the case of a staff member becoming no longer staff, their staff account should revert to being a regular user.

This could, of course, make historical discussions lose some of their context, with seemingly non-authoritative users making authoritative statements.

To mitigate that for the people who take the time to investigate these things, if an account is stripped of its Staff status, the account's profile should show that it was previously a staff account, and possibly even what dates its Staff status was in effect.

This is inspired by LiveJournal's display for Early Adopter accounts that enjoy a better status now, such as "Permanent Account, previously an Early Adopter".

If dates of time on staff are mentioned, the system should allow for someone who leaves and returns an arbitrary number of times, although that does sound like a really weird use case.

Poll #1607 Show former-staff status on profile

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 35

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
23 (65.7%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (2.9%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
2 (5.7%)

(I have no opinion)
8 (22.9%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (2.9%)

Comments

[kaigou]

Erm, I'm not entirely certain how DW is doing this, but wouldn't it be that one has a private/personal acct (not for making at-work statements as staff) and then an account that's the official staff/I-work-here account? In that way, if someone leaves DW as staff-member, that account simply goes inactive, as it would for any other account. (Your comments don't disappear just because the account's closed, right?)

The use of a personal account for work-stuff and personal-stuff is what leads to a) people being confused as to when one is speaking ex cathedra, and b) situations like this hypothetical, of ex/former staff. If staff have professional staff-only accounts, wouldn't that avoid this entire question?

[yvi]

Yeah, that's what I thought would happen as well. That staff accounts are not to be used when a person is no longer staff and this is pretty much *why* they are separate.

[azurelunatic]

Aha, I found what I was remembering:

[10:34] Azz: Staff journals. There are two ways to do things if someone leaves staff. 1) pull their access to that journal, which has its pros and cons.
[10:34] aveleh: Thanks. (You have most of the code done already, right?)
[10:34] *** Che has signed off IRC (Ping timeout).
[10:35] Azz: 2) change the journal type on them to personal, letting them keep the journal but no longer be Staff, which could have the unintended effect of pulling Staff status from stuff they have said/commented in the past.
[10:35] Sophie: aveleh: Yeah. I'll need to update the code to allow for posting to a Dreamwidth community as well as an LJ one, and there'd need to be an account the code can use to post from, so I might just use my own for now. (or ask someone for an invite code, whichever is better)
[10:35] Sophie: Azz: Maybe have another status for 'expired staff'?
[10:36] Rogue: 'retired staff'
[10:36] Sophie: With an appropriate head icon. Then you could do 1) and replace the status.
[10:36] Sophie: Yeah, 'retired' is better.
[10:36] Sophie: I didn't know the best way to put it.
[10:36] Rogue: :)
[10:36] aveleh: Azz: I think Rah said earlier (although she may have changed her mind) that she'd rather pull old staff status, and she won't care if old stuff no longer looks official.

[yvi]

Huh, interesting. It was my impression that people who own staff journals would also always have a secondary personal account, hence there being no need for reverting the staff account afterward. But I might have just really misunderstood that point.

[azurelunatic]

I also understood that there would always be a personal account, but thought the concept of pulling access to the professional account to be fair but harsh, and, after that IRC exchange, was happy to think that it would only be a loss of staff status, and not loss of control of information.

[kaigou]

the concept of pulling access to the professional account to be fair but harsh

That's no different than what any company does when you no longer work for them. It's not harsh at all. It's a factor of being staff, and when you are not staff, you do not have it anymore.

[denise]

Eh, that would be true elsewhere, but here it's different; there'd still be public content present (assuming said staff member had used their account for posting about things on the journal side, such as how Mark and I post about the process of working for DW) and that's content the person should retain control over.

(This is something we won't be running into for a while, I imagine -- it will be a long time before DW can afford employees other than me and Mark, and longer past then until those employees decide to move on, one supposes -- but the idea of taking an account away from someone like that makes me kinda itchy.)

[afuna]

Different cap, so they'd have a different icon? Some variation of the staff icon, but one that could make it clear that they were ex-staff.

[magycmyste]

my suggestion would be to make the red swirly on the staff icon blue for retired staff

[azurelunatic]

Ooo, I hadn't thought so much about color changes until you mentioned it.

Since there are users in the wild whose eyesight falls in that profoundly inconvenient area between essentially functional and poor enough to require a screen reader, I'd want there to be something other to distinguish their appearances besides just the color.

Now my mental image has a darker blue background, the user head, and then a negative-space spiral "erased" on top of it.

[magycmyste]

Ooh, point. Hadn't thought of the screenreaders.

So when you say a negative-space spiral, it would be sort of.... blank? Just having problems visualizing that.

Also, I don't remember if it was mentioned here or in another suggestion (I think it was the one about the really old smiley icons), but would it also be possible to add alt text that screenreaders could read? (Not sure if that's a separate suggestion in itself, but I figure the different icons would have different alt text)

[azurelunatic]

Blank, like someone had erased the spiral.

I assume that anything where there's meaning carried by the icon is going to have alt text, so that would be part of the same suggestion, but it never hurts to mention it explicitly.

The staff icon is "[info - staff]" -- I'd think "[info - former staff]" would work.

[azurelunatic]

Yeah: the contents of an email account are either irrelevant or can be archived and accessed by whatever successor, and a redirect can be put up and all comers auto-responded with a "Hi; they're gone; please talk to their successor" message. A journal is not only going to have community entries and comments in other journals, which may need editing and other care, but there is likely to be content in the journal itself, such as your bug counts and calls for submissions to dw_news posts.

With the Dreamwidth business environment, and its predecessor in LiveJournal's business environment, it's also possible that a staffer might step down as staff, but be retained as a volunteer in some capacity or other, and still have an official presence, even if it's no longer a staff-official presence. (Speaking of which, are you going to encourage volunteers holding staff-page-level positions to create an official business journal? It's probably more likely to have a volunteer elevated to staff at this point than the other way around.)

[denise]

I think we're both fine with any volunteer wanting to create a separate journal, although I'd encourage people to cross the streams as much as possible so it's clear our volunteers are Real Users who just want to keep the housekeeping tidy. (I honestly do not ever see us Officially Hiring people from anything outside the volunteer pool except in the case of really specialized roles we won't need for a while, and even then I'd like to pull from the userbase-at-large.)

[azurelunatic]

From the discussion back in the day, I got the strong impression that instead of pulling a former staff member's access to their previous staff account, that only the staff status (and access to staff-only comms) would be pulled, and they could use it or not as they chose.

[kaigou]

As a non-staff user, if someone was staff and is no longer, it's never going to occur to me to check their profile. If someone has staff-assigned account, the assumption is they're staff; it's like when you work for a company and get a company email. You don't have access to that email when you leave the company.

I mean, if the little swirly thing indicates that an account is an official staff account, and that swirly thing is gone, then previous correspondence will now look like a non-official person making official remarks, or just being treated like they have the authority to do so, for no obvious reason to the late-comer.

The swirly thing on the person-icon is how I determine that someone is speaking with some kind of authority, at least in lieu of anything else obvious. If you take that away, then it's going to be gone on all their previous comments. If you leave it to mark previous comments as being made by staff, then the person shouldn't have access to the account with its official-looking swirly thing when the person is no longer staff.

If one sees swirly thing on icon + line through name, it's pretty obvious that it's an official staff account that no longer exists. Isn't that essentially the objective?

[kyrielle]

A strike-through indicates deletion, though. That would also remove all the past posts in the account, which might be relevant. Conversely, if the account is not deleted but is still on the system, and the user can't log into it, either no one can maintain it (if the style breaks, if rude comments get posted to the journal entries where everyone can see them), or else the current staff would have to maintain prior staff journals.

I do think it's important, if the journal isn't closed, that the swirly icon be changed to something else to show ex-staff. Someone looking at an official statement under that would then know to glance at the profile for dates if they were really worried about the validity of the statement.

[queenbarwench]

Maybe a strike through the swirly, or a grey swirly? These could mean 'retired' and the permissions could be changed without losing control over the content or changing the context of historical discussions.

[ninetydegrees]

I don't know what happens but if the account goes inactive I'd still like it to be stripped of its staff status and its profiled edited as Azurelunatic suggested.

[azurelunatic]

Good point also -- it might be unnecessarily confusing to have an un-tended account with staff status sitting around, as a newcomer might make inquiries of that individual and be vexed to never receive a response (said account being not monitored and with its original holder not able to access it).

[ninetydegrees]

*nods*

[cesy]

I'd say have a new userhead for no-longer-staff, so they can keep the account but it's clear at a glance, and then a note in the profile to explain.

[kate_nepveu]

I also would prefer a change of userhead for no-longer-staff to go with a note in the profile.