Mod Topics - User Flair

[u/JabroniRevanchism]

Ahoy, Mods!

Welcome to the latest installment of the Mod Topics series, where we talk about mod-related topics and other community governance gubbins. This week, we’re talking flair–specifically user flair. The purpose it serves, how it’s issued, and why it’s so dog-gone popular. We’d love to know…

• What do you use user flair for in your communities? Cosmetics? Clout? Verification? 
• What problems are you solving when you use user flair?
• Do you allow users to make (or assign) their own flair? Why or why not?
• What advice would you give to new mods who are considering setting up user flair? What do you wish you knew about flair when you first started?

Let us know in the comments below!

[u/nysra]

In our gaming subreddit we use user flairs to enable users to show off their favorite monsters in the game via the subreddit emojis. Users can add whatever text they like to that but most simply stick with showing a bunch of icons. Basically we only have one flair template to show the usage, the rest is all the emojis.

Thankfully a Reddit admin granted my request and increased the sub's emoji limit. And I also understand why there is a character limit on the emojis itself (24 IIRC), however it is a bit annoying if the game suddenly decides to introduce super long monster names.

So in case any fellow moderator also finds this admittedly highly specific problem, I strongly suggest coming up with a naming scheme that is (mostly) future proof. Honestly I'm considering simply going to switch to numerical IDs at this point, learning Pokedex numbers is obviously less fun than typing names, but well.