The featured blog entries show the name of the blog to which they have been posted, rather than an author byline as such.

Exactly. So to rephrase, could/should a byline be added?

I'm not convinced that there is a need, although would be happy to hear your argument in favour of a byline

It's just nice to know who I'm reading. It would be nice to click their name and see their profile, perhaps visit their website, see what threads/forums they're involved in, and so on.

Edit: wow, it took over a minute to post this little reply. I see there is another thread on the long delays, but add another person who is experiencing the problem. Must be a server issue.

I guess my feeling on that is the author is identified by the blog, which is shown. Click on that link and you get access to all that you mention.

By bylining the blog it draws attention to that rather than the individual, and we want people to visit and read the blogs primarily. Once there, they can then go do all the author related stuff, no?

As for the slowdown, Dani and Blud have been informed and are breaking into their semi-vacation thing to look at the issue. Trouble is it seems to be one of those impacting upon some people some of the time things, so hard to track down :-(

The member's name and a link to their profile has always been in the sidebar under the "username in a nutshell" area where "username" is hyperlinked to their profile. As Davey suggested, it's always been there but it's also always been classified more as extraneous information with the user's actual blog, that the entry belongs to, being the primary way of classifying the blog entry.

I'm talking about featured entries. Reading a particular featured blog, there is no information about the author, no link to their profile.

Ah, gotcha.