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

[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.