I like the idea of putting a "tagline" like the year graduated after the last name so everyone knows who is who. I don't have a multi year site, but we have invited the adjoining years as guest members. On our class I just show the name, but on all guest members I have been using a tagline after their lastname with their graduating year. This works great. BUT. Sometimes they go in and remove it. This is way down on the list if at all, it's not a big priority at all, but it would be nice if there was one line that administrators could control to put a short tagline of info after their name. Then they couldn't remove it or edit it.

Brad,
Looks like this has been suggested three times, but in different ways. A field in the DETAILS/PROFILE that is displayable, but only editable by the admin.

I did a search but didn't find it, sorry. It's hard sometimes to find things when everyone calls it something different. Next time I'll try to be more thorough!

No problem, I was just trying to suggest that since this has been requested 3 different times, it was something that is NEEDED.

See this message http://forums.classcreator.com/messages.cfm?threadid=5EEB9ACF-98ED-B728-878A7BBFC8B6B265

My original post is listed inside of the above post

I understand the request. I'm not sure what we'll be able to do here any time soon due to time constraints alone. If you are adding other years in as guests, can I ask why you're not just moving to the multi format, where members are already broken down by year and year info appended to names as needed? The multi setup already addresses this issue very nicely.

I realize there may be other scenarios here other than just other class years where a simple year needs to be appended to the name. But there's really a lot more can of worms that will open here than you think if we start giving admins the ability to append additional text after a Classmate's name. There will be more, but just off the top of my head:

1) Classmates who don't want more text after their name may complain. Not just to you but to us. We hear from Classmates regularly, usually redirecting them back to their Site Admin as we just don't have time to support many Classmate questions.

2) Long names will be a real issue all over the system. On the Classmate Profiles page really long Classmate names truncate as it is. Adding even more stuff will truncate even more. At least now if a last name truncates you generally know what that last name is anyway. But if you add even more stuff, some or even all of your additional info may truncate. Thus adding something like this causes a total relayout of the Classmate Profiles page (probably from having names in two columns to only having names in one column). Doing that doubles the amount of scrolling necessary on the page, which I'm also very hesitant to do.

3) You'll have the same truncation problem in other places as well. Like the Profile Updates box. The Where They Live box.

I'm sure there will be a variety of other things too caused by really long names. So -- I don't want you to think I think it's a bad idea -- because I totally understand the desire and why you're wanting to do this. I'm just not sure appending stuff after the name, at least not for now, is the solution. Maybe there's another place we could put this info. We could even let the Admin control the ALT field, so if you hover over a name, more info about that name pops up. Would that be at least a help for now on something like this? That's something we could do in 10 minutes, as opposed to having to make major structural system changes to accommodate really long names.

Kyle Erickson wrote:

Kyle,

You're right...you asked first, then I did and now we have a third request. Maybe Brad will find it in his heart to add us to his ever growing to-do list?????

Vicki

Brad Switzer wrote:

Brad,

I kind of like the idea of hovering over the name and having some information show up, but is there a character limit there? Depending on how many characters you guys can give us, that just might make all of us happy.

Vicki

Don't press your luck.

It's worth a try.

Have a great weekend, Brad!!!!!

OOOH, I actually like the hovering over the name idea better! Whatever works for you, and is easiest to do. And, as far as what I need, I only need it to be 7 or less characters.

I didn't want to go to a multi-year site because I just don't want to be responsible for all the other classes right now. I may do that in the future, but right now it is only a few from other years (like brothers/sisters, spouses of my class year), but it confuses the people in my class when they see a name and they don't have a clue who it is.

You'd probably have to put instructions somewhere to hover over names to get more details behind that name. Although you could pretty easily write such instructions. So next the question is, exactly where do you want this "hover" alt tag to exist? On EVERY instance of the name whenever the name is clickable throughout the entire site? I'm assuming you'd want it everywhere. Is there anywhere you wouldn't want the alt tag to pop up when you hover over the Classmate's name?

When hovering over any classmates (all/every) would be fine with me. Whichever is easiest for you Brad, I can work with you!

And, yes, I would just put a little info blurb on the homepage to let them know that is there. It would replace the blurb I have right now about how to tell if someone is guest, faculty, etc.