The New JFP: Some Suggestions

I've had a chance to sit down and familiarize myself with the new JFP. My overall impression is that it's a decent first draft. If they get some kinks ironed out, there's a lot of potential for this to be good. But right now, there are some problems, most of which seem to me to be related to the fact (I think it's a fact, anyway) that this thing was put together very quickly.

And I don't mean that as a criticism, exactly. Since taking over as ED (just in August, right?), Amy Ferrer seems to have moved extremely quickly to get a new JFP system set up. I think that counts for a lot. After years of being ignored by Schrader, we have an ED who is paying attention to us and trying to help. I cannot begin to imagine David Schrader leaving a comment on this blog, or reading it, or even knowing about it. Let alone implementing a suggestion that was made here or on Philosophers Anonymous or something.

And this is important function of the APA. PhilJobs is great, and the Phylo jobs board and wiki are great. It's great that there are volunteers who do this, and who do a good job. But the profession needs to have an official job market service center. It would not be at all kosher to just leave the JFP exclusively in the hands of volunteers--however good at it they may be.

That said, there are a number of areas for improvement. I don't claim to be the first to have mentioned all of these, but I'm too lazy to go back through yesterday's comments and cite sources. For the same reason, I'm not going to make any attempt to compile a complete list of suggestions. These are just the main things that stood out to me as I was browsing around last night and this morning.

(I'd also like to point out that I strongly agree with Jaded's remarks yesterday regarding constructive criticism. I'm trying not to just complain and stuff. I'm trying to complain constructively.)

• The AOS/AOC stuff should be displayed on the ad thumbnail. Ok. I see that this has been fixed. But it seems to me that the AOS and the AOC fields are not adequately distinguished.  
• There should be a way to get all the ads to display on a single page.
• The AOS/AOC tags don't work very well--I click on the tag for my AOS and I get a lot of stuff not in my AOS. Which makes me worry that I'm also not getting everything in my AOS. 
• The "open" AOS/AOC tag returns ads that are not open.
• The AOS/AOC tag thing doesn't seem to distinguish between AOS and AOC.
• Does using the "filter" function with the checkboxes for "grant/fellowship" etc. negate the AOS/AOC tag filter? There doesn't seem to be any way to confirm or disconfirm this. The UI at PhilJobs is a good model here--you check some boxes in one area, and then you check some more in another area, and the boxes in the first area stay checked. This UI has no boxes for areas of specialization or competence. 
• When you "star" an ad, it should be marked as starred on the thumbnail.