I think @erus was referring to whether staff members who passed away received a badge in their memory or something similar, that's at least what I understand from his post. But that is something that must take years to achieve, where "groups" of users create bonds of friendship and have contact beyond the borders of the forum. This way you could know when a member died and be sure that it was. Although I'm not sure, there may be groups like this on local forums, where there is more concentrated activity of users from the same areas (some of them). I don't think it's necessary to know the real identities for something like this.
Well, I rarely care about this issue before though I am quite worried about my crypto assets on CEXs. I think that if they want, the admin can absolutely add some badge for inactive accounts for 3 years or more, for example "dormant" or "classic" ^^
For me, this is not really important, just open the profile and we can easily know that someone has not been online for many years and is no longer active on the forum. In case that person will receive a reward from some contest, the reward can be sent to their address as usual, or the admin will receive it and send a message so that the account holder can contact and receive it when returning to the forum.
I plan to hand over my account to my children so that they can continue to learn and contribute to our forum development after a few decades. I hope that by then AltcoinsTalks has really become a major force in the crypto community!