Hello fellow nixers,
This thread is about a choice you need to make about custom user titles.

A custom user title is the text that appear above someone's avatar.
I'd like to know if you would want to keep them or not.

I've been thinking and looking around the forums and it seems like user titles are pretty annoying (very subjective idea).
Here are my opinions,

• They are very distracting.
  
• if a user wants to show his personality on the forums there are many other ways to do so.
  
• When they are too long they mess the layout.
  
• I can't find a good reason to have those in the first place.
  

Remember that you are free to express yourself.
Thank you all!

Don't really care, they don't do anything and the only reason I don't have one is because I can't think of anything to put there.

I say yes, but set a maximum amount of characters to prevent the layout mess-up.

On an other forum I'm suscribed to, that's the admin role to set them.
Once you reach some "level" of activity, mods give you some (really) small text to put there. For example, mine is "Wonder ?" (in reference to wonderbras). So it's just a funny thing, and the mods can control it (it's way funnier when you don't choose it ^^).

Sometimes, it's used to give status to members, on help forums and such, so that you can quickly know if you can trust what a user says (most of the time, it's related to the number of posts)

I like z3bra's idea, the title alone is pretty useless and provides nothing more then our signature space. If it had some type of actual value, it would be a lot cooler.

About the idea of z3bra and Mafia, this puts me in a role I'd not like to endorse. If I start assigning custom user titles to people it'll mean that I'll start administering the forums in a subjective manner which I'd like to avoid.

Good point. But you can only have the rights to change the title, and let the community choose titles. Or maybe just use more "standard" ones, like "Pro ricer", "Coder wannabe", "BSD user" (it's a status on its own :P)

(27-08-2014, 05:26 AM)z3bra Wrote: Good point. But you can only have the rights to change the title, and let the community choose titles. Or maybe just use more "standard" ones, like "Pro ricer", "Coder wannabe", "BSD user" (it's a status on its own :P)

It might gives birth to a lot of injustice and hate. Why not stay away from the "I have a title and you don't" scheme.

Although it may be seen that way, at the same time we all have things that we are known for. It's not as much about standing out as it is about wisdom. You earn a title unknowingly through something you do normally, you don't compete for it and you don't ask for it. It's like a certification of sorts. It holds no real value, it's just used more as a marker for users interests. If someone joins our site to learn more about a certain aspect of *nix those titles could guide them towards their answers through irc or pms rather then them just joining up and posting a repetitive thread. An occurrence we all know happens more then not on most forums. I see no real downfall to this feature, we are all mature here. This is a community we all built, we all know there is no injustice here. We need to set a standard and not fear having to enforce it.

(27-08-2014, 06:46 AM)Mafia Wrote: Although it may be seen that way, at the same time we all have things that we are known for. It's not as much about standing out as it is about wisdom. You earn a title unknowingly through something you do normally, you don't compete for it and you don't ask for it. It's like a certification of sorts. It holds no real value, it's just used more as a marker for users interests. If someone joins our site to learn more about a certain aspect of *nix those titles could guide them towards their answers through irc or pms rather then them just joining up and posting a repetitive thread. An occurrence we all know happens more then not on most forums. I see no real downfall to this feature, we are all mature here. This is a community we all built, we all know there is no injustice here. We need to set a standard and not fear having to enforce it.

Why am I hearing Frank Underwood's voice while reading this?

I don't have any strong feeling one way or the other. I don't have one I don't think, but some others' are funny
EDIT: I have one

Because Kevin Spacey is my underling.

Can the people who voted yes state why so we can see the pros of keeping custom user titles?
From the previous posts I can tell that one of the reason to keep them is to show a user status in the community but can't this be done with a signature?
What would be the difference from a signature?
Would you rather have other people set your title?

It could be nice to have user titles related to the number of posts.
I find it useful on some forums, like Archlinux. When someone gives you an advice, you'll act differently if he posted 14 messages or 737.

But yeah, if we keep them, I think it would be nicer if it was set by other people. Otherwise, it's just the same as the signature

(28-08-2014, 10:40 AM)z3bra Wrote: It could be nice to have user titles related to the number of posts.
I find it useful on some forums, like Archlinux. When someone gives you an advice, you'll act differently if he posted 14 messages or 737.

This would lead to a lot of injustice. For example someone might have more than 100 posts and not be knowledgeable in a field compared to someone else that just started posting but the other posters will take the answer of the first one more seriously.
The same situation happened on many other forums: skids have badges and are respected based on that.

i like custom ones. but i also like earning them. i also like when mods 'bestow' them on you.

Well you already have my view. A title is just that, a title. A signature is more of a advertising space, you'll notice it's mainly used for pictures or hyperlinks, things you can't add to a title.

For now, I've added a character limit for the custom user title to 20 but it seems like it only takes effect after the user changes his title again.

Thanks for all the input.
I'll keep the custom user titles but with a limit of 20 characters so if you had a one with more than 20 chars it'll cut down.

(28-08-2014, 09:58 AM)venam Wrote: Can the people who voted yes state why so we can see the pros of keeping custom user titles?
From the previous posts I can tell that one of the reason to keep them is to show a user status in the community but can't this be done with a signature?
What would be the difference from a signature?
Would you rather have other people set your title?

I like titles because they're small, at the top of the post, and are most often funny. Except mine, mine's shit. But signatures can get excessive very quickly and are very 2000s forum-like. Having others set the title could be fun!

i like the way of titles... just some words defines that user... i think it is like:
mert:x:1000:100:n00b:/home/mert:/bin/sh
mert is your login but n00b is description