That’s a good idea, though we’ll have to figure out how to prevent impersonation. It’d be easy for anyone to make a profile photo have the Virtualmin staff logo on it and maybe do something shady (maybe in PMs so we never even see it). The “Staff” label can’t really be faked by a user. I think maybe the flair should appear somewhere outside of user control, actually, now that I think about it…so, I don’t think I want to use whatever plugin they’re using, but I bet we could whip something up…it’s probably just a stylesheet thing.
I will leave the implementation to you.
One small thing, the staff logo is overlaid and crosses the profile picture boundary I think.
Small note on the impersonation concern — Discourse has this built in, no plugin needed. Admins can set a flair image on the automatic ‘staff’ group (Admin > Groups > staff) and it overlays a small badge on the avatars of everyone in that group. Since group membership is controlled by admins, random users can’t get the badge, so impersonation isn’t possible.
The user controls their own avatar image. Adding a Virtualmin logo badge is entirely possible. It wouldn’t be able to expand slightly outside of the avatar image circle, the way an overlaid badge can, but it would be trivial to make an image that looks like the badge is doing that. You just offset it a little bit and make everything a little smaller. That’s a subtle difference many people would miss.
So, no…it doesn’t really prevent impersonation. Any trust indicator in a user-controlled part of the UI is an impersonation risk.
While I do agree that it would look nice if the staff team (perhaps certain memberships later on?) would have a badge icon additionally to their staff flag (not just only the badge, but the flag plus badge).
I understand that it could open the doors to misuse that function (impersonation), even though it is already possible to impersonate people. Very limited and quite easy to notice, but its possible. If it is system controlled and not accessable to the general user, than it would be something else. I guess it just depends on the implementation.
There can be no misuse, and there is a way to prevent impersonation.
All the staff get this icon overlay on their profile picture indicating they are staff.
It shouldn’t be an overlay. It should be a dynamic element that looks static on its own, but when an avatar with the icon overlay is hovered, it should perform an animation that wouldn’t be possible to fake.
I haven’t tried to implement that yet, and it’s just my first thought after reading this thread.
Yeah, that was exactly my point. Perhaps there is already an option for this or a plugin. I’d have to check.
I like the animation.
Thanks! I do too.
However, I don’t like how unrecognizable our full donut logo looks when it’s small. I will probably have to redo it and use only a green tick animation, which would probably be better.
maybe a blue background will help visibility.
Nah, I don’t think so. Blue would draw too much attention to the flare.
I updated it again, yet I’m still not confident whether the flare feature is really needed or helps at all.
@Ilia
If browser is in dark mode, the first iteration looks way better
Alright, I updated it again. See now please.
simple, clear, easily identifiable.
does not mess up the profile image underneath
the profile picture getting a green border is a nice touch and the sonar effect on the flair re-enforces that you are staff.
Yes much better! 
It indeed looks good, even though I think blue might fit better to the overall design with the pages.
I like the effects when you hover above the icon/flair.
