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In two places, the current display emphasizes the last person to modify something rather than the person who originally created it. Namely, on the front page (and questions page), each question is marked with an icon for the person who last answered the question, but there is no icon for the original asker. On the individual question page, the person who last edited an answer is displayed as prominently as the person who wrote the answer.
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.
I agree wholeheartedly - I think it does give a misleading impression, or at the very least not add anything useful to the front-page information.
I'm agnostic on whose name should appear, but I think we should resist putting more information on the front page. I think it's already a bit terrifying for new users. I can just about remember my first time here, and thinking: !%+?!# that's a lot of information!
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 agree with (2) completely (it's my (1) below), and I disagree with (1) (see my (4) and (5) below). Let's try and separate out all the different situations so that we're sure we're talking about the same thing.
Anton, I wouldn't forgive it, I'd welcome it. Although it's another word (or two if you add a "by"), it's a word that clarifies, making the site more comprehensible to newcomers.
I agree with Anton's (1)-(4).
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.
@Ilya: Unfortunately, it looks like the the two cells of user information (one for the post owner and the other for the editor) are indistinguishable by css. Is there some way to use css to modify the appearance of the first item of class "post-signature" within an answer, but not the second?
The :first-child pseudoclass should do exactly that; according to this comparison basically every browser newer then IE6 supports it.
They say so (it's CSS 2.1)
@Ilya: thanks for the link. I'll check it out. I just realized that it might be a bit more complicated since you don't want to select the first "post-signature" item if there's only one (and maybe there are other issues), but it looks like pseudo-classes are powerful enough to do the job.
One has class post-signature, another has classes post-signature owner; problem solved :)
No, that's not always the case. Sometimes the second one is just post-signature. I'm not sure what the rules are for when the owner appears.
The right box on questions is typically post-signature owner. It is colored grey; and this color is given by owner class. An exception is CW questions: I guess the logic is they don't have "owner", so they are white, not grey.
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.
I fixed that by the "hack" of posting my own answer which I then deleted. So my name now appears mysteriously on that question even though there's no trace (for normal users) that I did anything!
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.
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.
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