Staff and Participant Titles

There is a thread in Technical News advising of the likelihood that the use of the authenticator as an alternative to the email/password for website login could be done away with in the future.  During the conversation, a comment was made about how users currently can know who is a 'Project Admin' these days.  The response was that any such status should be displayed in a person's signature.

When the project used the BOINC based forum software previously, the status of people with any official 'capacity' was displayed to the side under their name and avatar.  This was lost with the change to the current system.  At the time, I seem to remember a comment to the effect that restoring the lost 'roles' information was on the to-do list, or something along those lines.  It must have turned out to be harder than expected or I imagine it would have been done by now.  I'm certainly not complaining about that.  I can imagine how much work of higher importance there is, to keep this project running smoothly.

However, one problem with relying on the content of a signature is simply that signature display can be disabled.  One reason why people might choose to do that is the significant download bandwidth penalty caused by the huge content that some people insist on putting in their signatures.  The official titles of Admin staff should be in a place where they can't be turned off by users wanting to avoid downloading these bloated signatures.

Currently, under a user's capitalised name, there are 4 lines of text for Joined:, Posts:, Credit:, and RAC:.  Would it be a simple enough job to add one further line of text for the role or title?  It should be the proper official designation for people who are regarded as part of the team, and displayed in a format that draws attention to it.  For general participants, it could also be used to 'incentivise' by having 'catchy/funky' titles - things (just off-the-cuff examples) like 'Noob' to 'Wannabe' to 'Dogsbody' to 'Gravity Hero' to 'Super Relativist' to ... whatever ...  in a large number of steps based on credit or post count or a combination of the two.  The emphasis could be on these being funny or catchy but not derogatory, something that might make a participant want to get to the next title.  Maybe something like this has already been suggested somewhere - I don't remember it if it has.

There could be a competition to come up with the coolest and funkiest titles, obviously with a character limit depending on the available space.  I could imagine such a competition throwing up some really clever word or idea plays and I could also imagine participants wanting to boost their contribution to get away from any with 'low level' connotations towards those with more desirability.  It could be a lot of fun with a far smaller penalty than that of signature bling.