💬 Feedback: Removal of user attributes in system notes and discussions

Background

In !96447 (merged), we merged a change that removes the username, status and availability from system notes and discussions.

Before	After

This was done to declutter the UI to act on the #1 (closed) SUS feedback of an "overwhelming and cluttered" UI. We believe that this is not the right place to show this information for the following reasons:

Username

Currently we have a lot of places where we have both full name (Marcel van Remmerden) and username (@mvanremmerden) in the UI. This takes up a lot of space and generally makes it tougher to build good UI as you always have to deal with wrapping lines, that's why we have already started to remove it from different places, e.g. the sidebar: !85511 (merged)

We want to move towards a model where it's always just one of them, while giving users the chance to switch which name to use in the UI in their preferences: #357566. Previously this wasn't yet possible as the suggestions when typing @ in a comment where only taking into the account the username, but this now works with full names as well.

Status & Availability

Both status (🌴) and availability (busy) are currently mostly used for 3 aspects: communicating that somebody is not available, for automation (e.g. reviewer roulette), or just for fun and self-expression. However, none of that should be displayed on each system note and comments for the following reasons:

• It's the wrong context, you need to see that somebody is out of office e.g. when setting assignee or reviewer, but currently only the busy status gets displayed there, not the emoji status
• If the user hasn't interacted with the issue/MR yet, you will thus only learn about their ooo status after you have already assigned them, at which point it's too late.
• It clutters an already busy page with repeating information

Instead of displaying all of these aspects on each system note, we could rather extend the availability to also include an out of office option next to busy, so that we can display it in the right context (e.g. when setting the reviewer) without cluttering the UI: #371718

The custom status with the emoji stays visible in the popover, so it's still accessible from most places where a user shows up in the UI.

Examples

I wanted to include a few examples of what we are gaining from this:

Before	After

Questions

• What do you think about the change?
• Are there any use cases for username, status and availability that we missed?