Switching between accounts

[mitar]

One person can have multiple accounts with different roles. Currently, they have to log out and log in. Because we want to encourage that people with different roles have different accounts, so that it is clear which hat they are wearing when they are making a comment (personal, moderator, etc.) we should make it easy to switch between accounts.

I think the easiest way would be to allow users to authorize another user to switch to them. If so, the other user will get in the menu an option to switch to them.

This could allow somebody also to invite somebody else to help them with their account if there is any issue, instead of sharing the password, for example.

We could also allow this authorization to be given just for a time period.

On the other hand this could open also new social behaviors. For example, on some social platforms it is already common to lend your account to somebody else to use it in your name. For fun or some other reason. In such voting platform this could allow somebody with high reputation to allow others to write in their name. Is this good? Maybe. It could be a form of making anonymous comments (#157), or prevent social repercussions by using the account with high social capital who might have more defense. On the other hand we could loose some of the transparency and accountability. Maybe when another user is acting in the name of the user, both usernames should be recorded. And then it would be displayed like on GitHub, that somebody authored, but another committed this, even two avatars. I think this would be probably the best but it is more effort to implement. (And we can have anonymous posts for times when one would need them to solve other issues.)

This could also help with accounts which are used by multiple people (like house presidents in BSC), that it would be clearer which of underlying people behind it is using it, because they would switch from their personal account to it.

Question is, could they also do this recursively. If I have authorization to switch to user B, and user B has authorization to switch to user C, should I be able to switch to user C? Probably not in this case (because then it is even trickier to make things accountable).