I try to answer question about sentence in Italian, my native language, when I can. In the beginning I tended to state in my answers with the fact that I am a native speaker, but nowadays I often do not.
As it happen, the question comes from a small set of users, so the original poster typically knows my answer is at least somewhat legitimate. However, more casual learners would not know this.
I also try to answer questions to my fellow Japanese learners, and in that case I am not that confident I give a reliable answer.
So I think it would make sense to add some kind of “native language” badge to forum users, so that by reading the thread, it would be easier to see whose answers are reliable.
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Very good idea!
But is it easy to implement? We were not asked about our native language(s) when we registered, were we?
If it is to complicated, a fast solution could be, that we all add an abbreviation at the end of our names, i.e. changing my name to MRgK-ger or yours to mike-lima-ita.
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I don’t know how hard it would be to implement the feature.
The forum account has a “Title” field that the user can change, I suppose another one could be added.
If the forum is managed through a third party product, as it is likely, it may not be very easy to do.
Can we change user name after enrolling? I don’t think so.
Maybe we could change the avatar picture? Language and nationality are different things, but flags are often used to represent language.
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