MyBB Community Forums

I was told to post this here to discuss it, please spare a moment of your time to read this proposal 😀
I can't remember the password to my previous account, so I'll post as Azah for now o.o

Perhaps, some simple badges (possibly even via Font Awesome) to show someone's status? That's one approach followed by various new forum software like Discourse, NodeBB, etc.

Coloured names aren't the best signifiers for showing what someone's status is as a forum might have various groups with their own unique colours. 1.8 handles this by having various different features like titles, stars (to a lesser extent, theoretically you could go super fancy with this for staff), badges, etc. although the way they exist now in 1.8 would overwhelm and overpower 2.0's clean and simple theme. E.g. The over the top graphics often used for badges.

An alternate approach to "font badges" would be to implement 1.8's group titles in 2.0. If MyBB is too short-staffed to add this, I could give it a try as I have a firm grasp of the PHP language having previously built several forum software from scratch, although I'm not that familiar with Lavarel (I am learning though, particularly from observing MyBB 2.0's source-code).

One place where it could be integrated into the current theme is in place of the date. Possibly move the date to the right or somewhere else? I'm not a designer, so I'm probably not the best person to ask about where to put things for the best UX value.

If group titles are implemented for 2.0, then one logical extension of this which is present in MyBB 1.8 would be the title system where users get new titles upon reaching a certain number of posts. One possible way this could be extended in 2.0 would be have various different criteria for titles (E.g. post count, topic count, like count, etc.), although, this might be outside the scope of the core functionality.

What are your thoughts? Which parts do you like? Which ones do you disagree with?
I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on this 

Adding batches is currently possible with the help of this plugin "OUGC Additional Usergroup Images (1.8)"
See, I added the batches to my site. the batches were designed by me.   feel free to join if you care, I might award you a batch too. 

http://nucuta.com/community/Thread-General-Rules

In relation to this idea I have a problem with having the additional "user group images" dependent on user group. For instance on my forum I've got user group images that represent (as of writing) about 24 different images. I've got another 30 or so I want to add. The problem is in order to add them I need to have user groups for each one.... which makes my user group list even more difficult to manage.

Either a built in mybb2.0 feature or plugin could solve the problem. On our old free forum from forumotion I believe they had a feature called "ranks" which was how I built the system before.

While the list would still be long they also had a better interface for managing permissions, which while isn't my main issue it is certainly an extension of the user group image problem. Having so many groups and managing permissions for them is near ridiculously time consuming and without an overview of permissions on a single screen I can't tell that every user group has the right permissions from a quick glance. This becomes even more complicated when adding additional forums.

So while they are two separate issues they are inter-connected. A more admin friendly and powerful user group management system is needed. Adding ranks could be a subset of a usergroup, creating custom permissions for the user(s) with the rank and granting them a specific "user group image" (aka rank).