Hey, first time back here in a while (been pretty busy!) so please go easy! I’m still getting used to the new setup here!!! :)
Oh, and just a heads up. Just as an example of quite literally how unique my presence here is - I’m actually a Super User/Forum Volunteer on my home forum over at OVO and basically the only such member of this one as a result!
So, I’ve got a bit of a weird question that I don’t think gets talked about much but I kinda wanted to ask it anyway as maybe I can learn from it… And maybe it’ll provide some food for thought for everyone else?
The TL;DR is how do you deal with cases where visitors to your community are - for whatever reason - confusing Super Users with your Staff by assuming that SU’s are Staff even when they’re not (and try their best to make it clear!)?
Longer version is that I’m known for being incredibly active on my home forum and have racked up some pretty incredible stats which put me far ahead of basically everyone else, mostly because I have a lot of free time and I don’t like doing nothing all day because that’s boring. So… I spend tons of time on Forums just kinda helping out (among other things, honest!)…
While that’s great, I’ve always had the snag that some folks will see things like my activity levels and my insanely high stats and assume I’m staff even though I’ve gone out of my way to try and make it clear I’m just a random guy on the internet helping out - which is why so many of my posts include the warning thing I tag them with about it. We’ve also got an ocean’s worth of warnings, reminders, clues and other hints all over the place that remind folks that the OVO Forum is powered by Volunteers who are customers ourselves, even going so far as using a custom Widget that Tim built a few years ago that reminds users who visit the topic creation page about the volunteer thing.
On top of that, I also drop manually written reminders on a regular basis into my content (and in ALL of my guides!) to remind people that I’m a Forum Volunteer who doesn’t work for OVO. Seems to work fine for most visitors who appear to pick up on the clues no problem, but we seem to get several who - for whatever reason - still try to play the “Blastoise186 is OVO Staff” card in one way or another (I won’t share examples) and make it quite difficult, and certainly awkward, to deal with the situation. Once they get it into their mind that I’m “OVO Staff”, I find it almost impossible to knock that vision out of their minds and even the Forum Moderators are struggling in some cases. It’s caused friction in a few threads in recent times as well.
I really don’t want to have to start putting big ugly impossible to miss giant rainbow comic sans warnings/disclaimers into literally every single post or comment that I write because of the clutter it’d cause and tbh… Most folks seem to understand anyway so I really don’t want to hammer it home more than necessary. For obvious reasons, I also don’t carry any roles/badges/ranks etc that show I’m staff - and that’s deliberate! And even if I did start putting said disclaimers on absolutely everything, that still doesn’t help if a user decides to ignore them (which already seems to happen in certain threads even when I do tag my content with that warning).
But short of having to quite literally change up my entire writing style or activity levels for absolutely everything, which would be a total nightmare, what else could I do to try and avoid this problem?
Just thought I’d throw this out there to get some advice - thoughts are absolutely most welcome!
