School / company info summary with avatar

[vikpaw]

It may already have been discussed, and i'm sure either way it will cause a lot of debate for and against.

 

Would be nice if we could fit it in, to have a short profile of the school under the avatar, i think it's more important than the location which could be 'dancefloor', 'server room' etc. there's still room to abuse and / or be secretive, but for those that want, an optional set of fields for institution type, size, etc would be nice.

 

I've read a few threads recently, where i'd like to put the posters view in the context of where they are working. Also, it would save having to explain, i'm from a primary of 300, i'm international etc.

 

Not sure what to do with companies, but they could just have it listed optionally too, nothing that would be deemed promotion, but just if they choose to have it shown, then institution could be 'supplier', 'tech support', 'la', 'lurker' etc.

[elsiegee40]

Every user has the opportunity to put this information on their "About Me" page; it's easy enogh to get to. Some may choose to disclose very little to minimise the risk of identifying themselves or their schools.

 

I think it would unecessary clutter to add it to every post as well.

[vikpaw]

it's a bit of a pain to have to go to the about me for each poster you're interested in. Plus the about me isn't the default, it goes to VM i think. On a slow connection, it's a pain.

There's a bit of redundancy in the info on the left, post count + join date (i know it's not linked), thanked + rep power + indicator bar, location + flag, not much use for 'thank post'.

Some of that could be moved to about me.

I see some people want to hide their info, which is fine, though often the generics i'm talking about often come out or become apparent from just reading a lot of posts, so why not say, 300 pupil primary, with RM cc3., or NHS hospital technician (1of5).

Just thinking out loud, because i felt the need recently.

[teejay]

I know what Vik means, quite often you need to know what type of school and size before recommending a product/solution. Maybe we could have icons next to the country icon indicating Primary/Secondary/FE/HE with different colours to indicate small/medium/large just so we've got a very quick way to determine roughly what type of school it is.