While having a poster's name at the bottom of their post (as was recently requested) is great, I think it is more important to have an "Author" designation for the Opening poster in the Site Talk, Ask a Question and Plant Identification forums threads.
How many of you find yourself reading these posts and wondering what the actual original thread question was?
- Either you have a good memory from day to day, or
- You don't care.
The way I envision, is to have an "Author" designation at the top of their posts, in the similar to administrator tags on each of their posts.
This well help keep participants on track, answering with pertinent information for the OP not for whoever else is posting, and thereby not veering from the subject. In turn, since two of these forums are heavily used by new members, it improves their experience at NGA, by receiving the answer they asked for without wading through superfluous banter.
On Site Talk, it would do the same, and the big benefit here is reducing Dave's time constraints, so he can work on other site projects.
In addition, just like welcoming new members fosters camaraderie, this authorship tag would make new members feel more important in the thread (as they should be!), and it's more likely they will become a contributing part of the community.
However, I don't think the "Author" designation is appropriate on most other forums here. There are to many on-going general chat threads where it is the accepted nature of the thread to change subjects.
