I'm in the process of redoing the theme for my main site in anticipation of releasing a game (it's going to take quite a while to get everything ready so don't ask for details yet). I've seen a few developers' forums style the staff posts in a different color (usually blue). I'm aiming for a relatively simple style (heavily inspired by brad-t's MyBB Humanization Project) and wanted to get people's opinions on whether or not styling staff posts would be a good idea. I would use pretty subtle shades (i.e. #EEF instead of #EEE for user posts). My main concern is that it would be a little distracting, and I can just make the staff members username a different color anyway for a similar effect.
So: Shade the entire staff post, or just the username?
my opinion - Shade the entire post.
Agree. Shading the entire post.
I agree. I much prefer shaded posts to non-shaded. But I think you should still color the staff's usernames. Maybe all different levels of staff could have the same color to make it seem unified.
I think either is ultimately pointless. Why would you want to highlight an admin's post in a discussion? There are only a few scenarios in which this would be helpful. In most of the cases it will be just a normal reply. It doesn't have to scream "Screw all the other posts. LOOK AT ME!". Even if it's a subtle change. It's just not necessary. If I had to choose I'd go with a coloured username. Their status on the forum is something worth noting, the entire content of the post might not be.
Perhaps in forums where it's useful, shade the entire post. For general discussion categories and forums where the topics aren't about your game/site, it'll probably be counterproductive.
So the general consensus seems to be shading the post. Unless anyone else wants to further the discussion, now I have the hard part: What to shade it so that it's noticeable but not distracting. My theme's going to be mostly silver/white with orange 'trim' so I now get to go color matching. The semi-traditional blue is nice and all, but I don't want it clashing with the rest of the theme. I guess I should at least try it out before discarding the idea though.
The reason I want staff (and really only certain staff, like developers (not that it matters as there's no difference because it's just me ATM)) to be a separate color is for discussions about the game or related queries, not all necessarily support but where official feedback would benefit from being more visible than non-official users' posts such as feature release hints in a "wouldn't it be cool if" thread.
Maybe a compromise would be the author info area is shaded in whatever color, and the post gets a subtly different text color?
Just change the background colour. Like WordPress does in comments.