Wow – that took over a day before anyone complained! Thought I had got away with it.
The log in link is where is’s always been (though that will be changing soon). However I have moved the logged in drop-down menu over the the right.
The impetus for this was that a few flash ads we are running were floating in front of the menu meaning users couldn’t get to the links. Normally we can sort this out with a few settings changes. However that wasn’t a route open to us for these new ads.
I made the decision to move it to the right as this would largely overcome the problem without too radical change.
I also would argue that the top right account management menu has become a “web convention” and that is where most users would look first.
I relatively new here, would you find it helpful I were to blog about changes to the site so as to improve communications?
I agree convention does say top right and I can see why you argue that, but where it was (directly above the forum navigation) was more natural in this particular forum simply because of the design and where the user is likely to be hovering in order to navigate into sections. And when viewing on a mobile device I now need to scroll to get to it whereas before I didn’t.
I can see your point regarding the Flash ads though – they were a bit of an inconvenience sometimes.