#TipTuesday: Show off your roles with the Role Titles addon

Hey, Success Community! Another Tip Tuesday coming your way, this time from your friendly Vanilla Support team.

Have you ever wanted to display a user's role(s) next to their username on posts? Well, good news! Roles Titles is one of our more popular addons and it accomplishes just that. I'm here today to explain how that works and a related configuration tip that many people may not be aware of. Let's dig in!

Roles Titles: The Basics

Firstly, let me illustrate what the Roles Titles addon does with some examples…

By default, roles are not displayed on posts, as you can see here:

However, with the Roles Titles addon enabled, it will now display that user's current roles:

In short, it's a simple but effective way for your users to see what roles the poster holds at a glance. This works on all types of posts in Vanila.

📝 NOTE: The Roles Titles addon is not to be confused with the Ranks addon, which similarly displays a user's Rank(s) next to their username on posts. Ranks are an entirely different thing, and the Roles Titles addon has no impact on them, but they can both be used simultaneously.

How to enable

To enable the Role Titles addon, simply go to the Addons page in the Dashboard and click the toggle button next to that addon:

That's great, but can I hide some roles?

A common question is whether it's possible to hide some roles while still making others visible. For instance, you may find that users have a large number of roles, as in the above example, and not want them all to be visible to Members or other users. Thankfully, there is a way to do this!

Firstly, a role's visibility is determined by whether it has the Personal Info option enabled. This option is visible when edit a role in the Dashboard:

If that option is enabled for a particular role, it means that only users with the Garden > Personal Info > View permission will be able to see it:

📝 NOTE: The above Personal Info permission has implications beyond roles: it will also allow visibility into info such as email address and IP address of other users. For that reason, you should proceed cautiously whenever considering giving this permission to a role and it's not something we typically recommend giving to Member-role users.

Putting theory into practice

As an example, using that same post again, say you wanted to hide the Moderator and Employee roles from anyone with the Member role but keep the other roles visible.

To do so, I would edit my Employee and Moderator roles and enable the Personal Info option:

Then I would ensure that my Member role does not have the Personal Info permission:

Now, as a result of those changes, here's that same post again as seen by a Member-role user:

Note how the Moderator and Employee roles are no longer visible. This would also be true if you go to the profile page of that "TestMember" user and looked at the roles there.

In Closing and Additional References

For more info on the Role Titles addon specifically, please check out this article in our Knowledge Base. To better understand the Personal Info permission that underpins this addon, please see this article ("Personal Info option").

As always, don't hesitate to reach out to Support if you have any questions about implementing this for your use case. Thanks for reading and have a great Tuesday!