Sponsor Badges disappeared?

Have the sponsor badges been taken down?

[Dani]

I switched it so they appear when you hover over a person's name/avatar instead of showing all the time, because they were taking up way too much vertical space and causing you to have to scroll past huge gaps between posts.

Does it bother you??

Maybe I'll come up with some nicer designed badges that take up less space (like being in the corner of the avatar).

It doesn't bother me at all. Just thought it was a good way to link to your donate page.

[Dani]

Yeah, it was, but after a day and a half, I was getting irritated by having to scroll down twice as far on each page. I'm going to start sending out mass-emails to community members who have been around awhile.

[Nick Evan]

I don't think this is a good idea Dani; the sponsor page wasn't very easy to find to start with and removing the badges won't help traffic to it either. And I didn't even notice that more scrolling was involved, but I have a big-ass screen :)

[<M/>]

i personally believe that the grey box that shows after you hover over a user's avatar should be alligned with it (the avatar) and increased in height so it can contain the featured/sponsor badge. The allignment seems better that way.

Or you can put the badges over/under the mod/admin badge... like before.

[Ancient Dragon]

I'm going to start sending out mass-emails to community members who have been around awhile.

Probably not a good idea, we get enough spam already.

I didn't see anything wrong with the original placement of the badge. On a PC it didn't take up any more real estate.

[Reverend Jim]

I'm going to start sending out mass-emails to community members who have been around awhile.

I don't have a problem with this. I seriously doubt that Dani is going to abuse this by filling my inbox with spam.

I'm with Happygeek here (message on a different thread), when he suggests that links to the donate page should be writ large and as in-your-face as possible. If DW is in need of donations, then it makes sense to me to make a link to the page as obvious as possible. I think the page link in the page footer may get overlooked. I rarely scroll down far enough to see it. So unless I roll over an avatar, which I can't say that I usually do, I have no obvious way to find the donate page, just from browsing. 2p.

[Dani]

It's a very delicate balance, because if people start noticing that we're requesting money sooner rather than later, it can be extremely offputting to becoming active within the community. The goal is to make the Donation button easily found by the regulars but very obscure to the newbies.

I understand your 'dilemma', but regulars probably won't see it anyway, as I suggested in my last post. Would a visible sponsor badge discourage newbies - does it need to be that obscure? I'm not sure that that would put me off.

[Dani]

Would a visible sponsor badge discourage newbies - does it need to be that obscure?

No, it doesn't need to be that obscure, but the way it was before was definitely causing vertical scrolling too excessive for my taste, especially for one or two line posts belonging to members with 2-3 badges.

[Dani]

I'm sending out a mass email to all of the regulars right now.

Depending on how much traction (if any) I get from it, will determine whether or not this whole donations idea is even something that could wind up working successfully. If everyone who reads the email doesn't donate, then larger buttons on the website isn't going to do anything better. However, if we get a handful of bites, it would make sense to push the donations promotion.

[Dani]

OK, email going out. xx crossing fingers xx

If nothing comes of sending out this mass email, then it's pretty much a done deal that this isn't going to be an avenue worth pursuing any further. On the other hand, if we get even a handful of bites, it means that it's worth building up our donation subscriptions feature, perhaps offering more features to subscribees, etc.

[Ancient Dragon]

I read your email and tried the link -- the link doesn't work. I get the error "Oops! Google Chrome could not find home". Here is the link

http://home/donate

[Dani]

Your email client must have done something funky to the links because they both work fine for me: www.daniweb.com/home/donate

but the way it was before was definitely causing vertical scrolling too excessive for my taste, especially for one or two line posts belonging to members with 2-3 badges.

Maybe get rid of the other badges then? Mod/Admin fair enough - but the others e.g. Featured Poster etc may be redundant if they have a 'higher level' badge. Just their top level badge and sponsor? Anyway, sounds as if I'm flogging the horse. I'll shut up about it now :)

[Dani]

The only badges are:

Administrator
Moderator
Team Colleague
Featured Poster
Sponsor
Vendor

Problem is a lto of people had 3 of them :(

[Ancient Dragon]

Your email client must have done something funky to the links

My email client is live.com and I access it through Chrome browser.

[Nick Evan]

Links don't work in my email either. Using squirrelmail

[Mike Askew]

Looked at the email after seeing this thread, can confirm hotmail also fails to load. The hyperlink in the email goes to home/donate

[Ketsuekiame]

Working fine here on GoogleMail.

Possibly something to do with the LiveFilter that Microsoft uses?

[Dani]

GRR, apparently some webmail clients strip away the HTML head, and therefore don't respect the <base href> tag. :(