I recently realized Discourse is missing yet another basic feature. I doesn’t show OP within a topic. If I’m reading a long topic with many posters, it’s easy to lose track of who started it. The old forum had a clear blue label “topic author”.
I know it shows the OP on the topic list page and also at the bottom of the topic (although it doesn’t really say there that the first avatar belongs to OP). But the ability to see who the OP is within the topic conversation is very useful.
Like all of the complaints, it’s easy to fix if you ask. We have added a background color to the OP posts. Maybe something else will be added too, let’s see how this looks first.
As infabo stated OP posts nearly unreadable at dark mode.
forgot about the mole people 
ok will have to wait for the designer then
It was already reverted.
How background color will help to identify topic starter, if you are in the middle or in the end of long topic? It’s possible, that a topic starter doesn’t post often in the topic. There should be either author nickname with avatar in the header, or may be pin first post, so it will be always at the top. Though, second option is very bad, if this first post is long, it will just consume a lot of space.
Something like that for example:
I don’t think changing the background is a good idea. It will interfere with other themes, not just dark (hopefully, more will be added eventually). It might interfere with post formatting like quoting, custom colors etc. It also breaks accessibility by overriding the whole concept of themes in these posts.
There is a lot of blank space on the line between post author and the dumbed-down timestamp. Can’t this space be used? I saw several other Discourse-based forums that have additional information there (see Please consider adding user ranks)
Something like this would be ideal:
This approach has been used in forums for decades. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Again, how will this help, if a topic author doesn’t post often? Scroll up and down to find author’s posts? Much easier to go to the top then. It should be always visible and the topic header seem to be the best and the only good place.
I think you are asking for something different. I’m not asking to see who the OP is at all times, I only want to see indication of OP’s posts so that I know whether I’m reading someone else’s comments/questions or OP’s.
Not saying your request isn’t valid, but I’ve never had a need for it nor do I understand why it would be useful.
Understood. You just mentioned that it’s easy to lose track of who is author, so without showing OP all the times, you can successfully lose it even with posts indication, if a topic author doesn’t post frequently. Indication will only help if OP posts frequently. Kind of half-baked solution 
Perhaps a poor choice of words on my part. All I’m interested in when reading posts is the understanding which ones belong to the OP. The OP’s identity itself doesn’t present any particular usefulness to me.
This style is in your browser cache. Hit hard reload to get rid.
I would suggest to not YOLO global style changes without proper testing and a mechanism to invalidate browser cache. As issues can affect a lot of users and not everyone knows all the knobs to clear caches and so on.
Yes. As mentioned, please clear browser cache. And colleague also mentioned, we will check on this further next week when designer is back from vacation. Updated version of modified theme is coming. And there are still changes we want to check if we can add to it.
My cache is set to clear everytime I close my browser.
All good now, it was fine yesterday then today it came back. pretty sure I’ve closed my browser serveral times since.
If it’s the same guy, who made WinBox 4, please don’t ask him for anything…
I really appreciate all of your feedback, but I think this goes a bit too far.
