Incidentally, our troll can't spell: the name was 'sit lips' rather than what Leonid wrote.

That was my hack solution to the problem. I figured that editing the troll's username slightly was the least disruptive thing to do. I guess I should have mentioned that I changed it.

I guess doing some meaningless retagging or adding a trivial space somewhere (if you've high enough rep to edit a post) would accomplish the same goal.

(Moderators: If this isn't acceptable behaviour on my part, please let me know.)

Incidentally, our troll can't spell: the name was 'sit lips' rather than what Leonid wrote.

Left, if present, is always post-signature and has align = right.

Both boxes on answers are just post-signature and align = right. But we can postpone doing them.

Also, CSS has special line for .owner-answer .post-signature but that could be a bit too fine distinction.

As for (5), I think it's confusing to have two different rules.

About (1): we may be able to do that ourselves via CSS.

1. On individual posts, I completely agree that the owner of the post (the person who wrote the original post) should be displayed most prominently, with the most recent editor displayed less prominently. Your experience of people thanking you for posting an answer you simply edited shouldn't happen. I would vote for this change. Please post the request on meta.SE (or maybe even meta.SO) and post a link here.
2. On community wiki posts, I kind of like that it lists the number of revisions, the number of users who revised, and the user who composed most of the content (along with how much of it she composed, though this number is often "wrong"). I would like to keep this.
3. On the various narrow views on the homepage (you probably only use the "active" tab), attached to each question is the person who last modified it (posted an answer or edited a post). I think this is the correct behavior since I like to follow individual questions. When one of my pet questions pops up to the top of the homepage, I like to see whose name I should look for when I click through to the individual question page. On S[OFU], they've introduced individual question timelines which make it easier to track what's been going on with a question. I look forward to this feature, but I'd still like that cue for what to look for. I would like it if it also said something about what the person is responsible for. For example, instead of "20m ago John User", I'd like if it said "20m ago asked John User", "20m ago answered John User" or "20m ago edited John User". If you agree with this, please vote up this feature-request. Perhaps Tom will forgive this extra bit of information on the home page. Maybe the "featured", "week", and "month" tabs should list the name of the person who asked the question instead of the person who last modified it.
4. On the active tab of the questions page, each question says something like "modified 20 mins ago John User". I think this is the right behavior for the reasons listed in (3) above, but I'd like the word "modified" to be more descriptive (i.e. it should be "asked" or "answered" or "edited"). If you agree please vote up this meta.SE answer and this meta.SO feature-request.
5. On all the other tabs of the questions page (newest, featured, hot, votes), it attaches the name of the person who asked the question. I think this is the right behavior. If I'm looking at the active tab or the homepage, I want information on the latest changes, but in these other views, I think the name of the asker is more relevant.

Exercise: Write a list of all the different elements on the front page. By an "element" I mean something like a number, colour, icon, piece of text, name, box, link or tab.

Pre-exercise: Estimate beforehand how long this list will be.

Confession: I've only done the pre-exercise.

There's a serious point here. I think we do have a bit of a problem with putting off newcomers, not only because of the much-discussed issue of impoliteness. We're running a pretty complicated system with a lot of bells and whistles. I don't have well-formed thoughts on how things could be done better, and I hope it goes without saying that I think this site is wonderful in many ways. All I know is that I'm wary of making it more complicated.

I don't like this. While users still earn reputation correctly in the sense of their MO score, the wrong people are getting reputation in the sense of getting the MO community to think warm feelings about them. I have twice gotten e-mails thanking me for answers when all I did was to edit in a few links to someone else's work. My preferred UI would be to: (1) On the questions page, put the person who originally answered the question in a large font, with gravatar; and put the much recent answerer in a much smaller font, perhaps without the gravatar (2) Use similar means to visually distinguish the original poster of an answer from the last person to edit it.

I realize that this question might belong on meta.SE, as we may not have the technical capacity to do this. But I want to first get a sense of whether other people think this would be an improvement.