Hi!

[Rebecca Petris]

Hi everybody,

After more than two years of almost entirely ignoring this forum (sigh) I'm finally able to come back and start paying it the attention it deserves! It was a wild two-year ride where the saline crisis affecting scleral lens users kind of turned my business topsy-turvy and I'm far from out of the woods with that BUT at least in a place where I am once again able to block off part of my days for more of the things I really want to be doing.

There's some changes afoot here, and some things I would love your feedback on, anybody that happens to see this! Here's the first ones that come to mind:

• I'm *trying* to go through my private message backlog. After I get through them, I'm going to turn off PMs for awhile - hate for people to feel like they're sending messages into a black hole, but I honestly can't respond to all individuals.
• The forum has moved. Please update your bookmarks!
  • You can use dryeyetalk.com, or forum.dryeyezone.com
  • BUT
  • Soon, you will NOT be able to use dryeyezone.com/talk. If you have bookmarks to any existing forums or specific posts, they will no longer work.
• I have an all-new DryEyeZone website on the way, launching later this month.
• I'm going to be doing some re-arranging in the forum

QUESTIONS FOR YOU:

• Anybody want to volunteer as a moderator?
• Anybody want to give feedback on things that you'd like to see changed here? Anything at all. Forums that are outdated and should go away. Forums that should be added. Different ways to use things. etc.

[waterbee]

Hi Rebecca

May I make a suggestion about possibly changing the color of the websites forum pages? White is to bright for me (I use an app that changes it to a pale green color plus flux). When I first visited the website I could not read it because it was too glaring / bright, and I had not yet learnt ways to adapt like I have in years past.

I would like to see a lot more up-to-date science news on dry eye too (like on twitter which is a good source for daily news). Also, I think the fact that people have to register to talk on here (I think I had to send a email saying why, but this was a LONG time ago and may have changed by now) may put some people off from joining. Maybe a guest option for those that don't want to register?

Finally, I would love to see more feedback from professionals, Q and A's and it would be great to hear from you even more. Your an inspiration to many people! .

Ps we need a dry eye shop for those outside the USA too!

[farmgirl]

What would the role of moderator involve?

[mbperso]

Hi Rebecca,

- Yes, It would be great to have a feedback from professionals, and potentially have the opportunity to discuss with them
- Have a special forum where to find out directly and quickly the treatment (recommended, proposed, used) related to a specific pathology:
For example the topic titles should only be the name of the disease. And the content should only be the proposed treatments

[Rebecca Petris]

Oooh thank you everybody, appreciate the feedback!

farmgirl It seems like the forum has lived just fine these last two years without moderators (once in a long while someone would FB messenger me about something they thought I ought to address). But in the past, it was mainly two things: (1) Just keeping an eye out for anything inappropriate (like advertising/soliciting) - that rarely happens since we went to doing all registrations manually, but we're moving back to automated registrations so it's possible spammers could slip through the cracks. (2) Filing dormant threads from the open forum in their relevant topics so they're easier to find.

waterbee I totally agree about colors!!! I hate this. The design everyone seems to be moving to is really hard on my eyes. What happened is when vBulletin changed to a completely different version and we had to upgrade to make sure we'd still get support, our old template was no longer compatible and I didn't have anybody to design a new one - so we're currently on a totally boilerplate template from vBulletin. It needs customizing, but their interface has changed a lot and I haven't learned how. Don't suppose there's anyone here who knows vBulletin. I seem to remember that on the old original forum (users here before 2015 will remember) I used to poll people about color changes and the vast majority always said no don't change it. But we had a warmer hue on the original.

Science news - totally. We might be able to work a dry eye newsfeed into it somehow. I just started testing out adding my twitter feed.

Doctors - once I've got the structure settled, I'll be reaching out to invite more. I am hoping that some of the tfosdewsii authors might post some.

Guest posts - I like that too! However we would absolutely have to have moderators if that were so. - One of the reasons this forum stays relevant, I think, is that you can at least be anonymous here (even if you do have to have an account) as opposed to Facebook.

mbperso Thank you! Yes re doctors! we did have doctors in the past (hosted Q&A) - maybe we could even do that again. Re treatment pages... so we do have specific pathology forums (scroll way, way down) - I think the difficulty of having a disease / treatment match would be that there is so much overlap? And I wonder if this is more about content rather than forum? For example, what would you think of on the new DEZ site, we have disease specific pages with all the treatments there but open it up to comments and direct people from there to the disease forums here on the forum? Hmmmm I'll have to ponder on this some more!

Keep it coming please, love to hear the ideas (and especially if anybody wants to pitch in )

[farmgirl]

HI Rebecca: If you find you need a moderator, let me know, we can talk...F/G