Allow moderators/employees to post under shadow accounts

An experimental idea that @timcavey is trying out with some trusted members and super users, involves having other employees getting involved in a few private areas to dig even deeper with feedback and discussions than what we’d normally have on the public forum. However, not all employees would want to be revealing themselves “publicly”, or run the risk of being discovered by users. While a shared login can be used to create a sort of “shadow user” that represents several others, it’s not ideal for security or auditing purposes.

One pretty neat trick that I’ve seen on a few systems, is the ability to allow trusted members (usually employees) to post things as a Shadow User, where the user profile that’s displayed publicly is replaced with something else. For example, instead of the author showing up as Blastoise186 and my usual avatar, I could post as a Shadow User called “Sunlight”, have the avatar show up as a picture of a sun instead and have the Custom Role/Title show up as Magician instead of Moderator - while still allowing trusted users (mainly Mod+) to see through the Shadow User and see who the real user is.

It’s hard to say whether such users should have their posts show up under the Shadow User by default, or allow them to choose each time. But this might depend on individual preferences.

This is of course something that shouldn’t be made available to all users, but I think it’s probably a better compromise than sharing a single account and having the login details of a single account passed around the company!