All,

Today, I've toggled the display of the forum moderators off. (On the forum listings, the moderators for each forum used to be listed. For right now, they are not.)

Please give your feedback on this change using the poll below.

Any comments can be left on this thread.

Thanks,
AR

I like it better: single choice
With the moderator listing	5%, 1 Votes
Without the moderator listing	15%, 3 Votes
I couldn't possibly care less	80%, 16 Votes
Total Votes: 20 Voting on this poll ends: 11/10/14 09:08 PM

I never noticed the moderator names were there, so I voted that I don't care which way it's done. I would really say that either way is fine with me, I am just thankful for work they do!

They are certainly most clearly recognizable by their color-coded screen names. Since they can all moderate any forum, I don't see that showing forum assignments really matters.

They are a pain to maintain, and all moderators are global anyway. If someone wants to know who the mods are, they can check out the MA Staff Guide. I think they just clutter the screen with extraneous information.

However, that's from my perspective. If our members find value in them, that's another story.

By the number of votes (I'm assuming many care so little that they've abstained) and the content of the votes we have so far, the trend is clear. I see where this is going.

We've been maintaining this for years when our members derive little to no value from it.

Hey, live and learn, right?

I would have answered differently before I read this.
I thought the moderators were the way they were assigned on the front forum pages but according to what you wrote they are all global.

So based on that I really dont see the purpose of knowing.

If it saves you work then I vote that is the most important thing.

I thought the purpose of the names was for the members and the moderators. Despite the fact that they're all global--forums are still assigned to certain mods in order to garner special attention and more in depth reading from a few moderators. It was supposed to alleviate the need for every mod to read every post on every thread. I don't think the names need to be listed as long as the moderators know what forums are their areas of concentration.

I put them back so that everyone can see the difference.

I like seeing who the mods are for each forum, particularly since each has their own perspective/s.
It's a curiosity thing, and I find it helpful and interesting, and in the spirit of transparency, too.

BTW, when you re-applied them AR, it seems the font is a bit smaller than before, which makes it less visibly intrusive, yet still right there. I like it.

My thoughts.

I had increased the whitespace around the data elements in the display. Just now, I decreased the font size to make it less obtrusive.

What I'm looking at is how to make the screens more user-friendly. While many people think that more information is better, people actually tend to get more stressed and feel overwhelmed by too much information on a single screen. (Good UX design principles, essentially.) Obviously, there's a balance between providing necessary information and providing too much. I'm trying to find a better balance.

Not meaning to add to your workload, but if you are tweaking anyway, could you please add a little more delay before the "mouse over" buttons pop up? If you are headed up to the "forums" button and overshoot a little then the "marriage support forums" or "articles" menus pop up really fast and then you have to move the mouse away and wait for the menus to disappear before you can try to be more accurate in aiming for the fairly small "forums" button.

Thank you.

Good Point - I have this same problem.

Or maybe they could be underneath somehow.