My message panel now looks like this: (I hide some receivers/senders’ images to protect privacy)
As you can see, for an active participant in certain Tags, it’s really hard for me to identify which message is sent to whom by looking at the user images. It’d be better if username is displayed, so that at least I can use keyword search to locate a user and message chain, rather than tapping on each user image to check their namecard and locate.
Hope I’ve made myself clear Appreciate it if you could consider this suggestion. It’d be very helpful!
I seem to remember that we have discussed this somewhere before, but I cannot find it right now.
It is difficult not only for regular taggers, but also for hosts of RRs or other users who write a lot of messages, to find a message chat with a specific person.
You only have the possibility to search all messages for the right avatar and that is very time consuming and annoying.
That’s why I would appreciate it too if the names of the chat partners were listed in the message panel so that you can find them by using “search”.
Just a suggestion as I don’t have many messages as you have, so not really a problem for me…
At least for tags, add the username to the title of the message, maybe it will help, no?
Yes, this is that what I did the last days, but if you don’t had start a chat, you can’t edit the headline and you have to ask the sender to do it and this is very uncomfortable.
And sometimes you have a chat with more than one person …
@Cassiopheia yes I think too that it was not possible, but unfortunately I do not find the old topic.
If I remember right, this was one of the last discussions we had on the sandbox. I tend to agree it’s not very easy to identify from the avatar. But unfortunately there’s no out of the box option to do this.
There’s also an issue when a message has multiple recipients, wouldn’t the list become too long and verbose (on the current layout) if showing the usernames?
It seems Discourse only shows up to 4 avatars from the conversation, and then shows “+X” if there’s more.
This helps, but the only way I see to make it not look too odd is to stack them vertically (instead of horizontally). This is should doable with some tweaks to align with the hallo effect of the last+first poster, but has two consequences:
This would make the list of messages much longer: at least twice as long. This is because each message has at least two avatars, so each line on that list of message would grow in proportion to the number of participants (up to 4).
This would have to be for everyone, regardless of the preferences for just avatar or avatar+username.
Thoughts?
I need to go now, but I’ll try to add a screenshot later with how this could look.
I just had a look at my messages. They are either with single people or addresses sent out for an RR group. You only have to look at the addresses once or twice to write the cards and I discourage everyone from answering in them so as not to spam the other participants, so you can archive the message immediately afterwards or remove yourself from the conversation. The bulk of messages are with only one other person.
I would appreciate usernames instead of avatars even if that means that the message display becomes twice as large, that is not a big inconvenience
Turns out, up to 5 it still displays everyone. More than that, it shows 4 and the “+X”. So the worst case is messages with 5 people.
If we go ahead with this, I would still have to at least align the usernames (the halo on the first one pushes things to the side) and try to handle cases with long usernames (it currently separates from the avatar into a new line).
For now, please leave comments on this option. I remind: this would be for everyone — not an option —, and it’s a hack, meaning, may one day break or stop working altogether since this is not officially supported by Discourse.
Appreciate it if you could consider this suggestion. It’d be very helpful! 
