Change 848345 had a related patch set uploaded (by Urbanecm; author: Urbanecm):

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] SpecialManageMentors: Reflect user time preference

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/848345

Thanks for catching this! The patch above should fix this bug.

Change 848345 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] SpecialManageMentors: Reflect user time preference

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/848345

Why is this column needed anyway? One of our mentors already expressed her resentment about this kind of forced transparency (here, in German), and I don't see a significant advantage of having this data collected on this page. Can we remove it completely, please?

In T321429#8348671, @Tkarcher wrote:

Why is this column needed anyway? One of our mentors already expressed her resentment about this kind of forced transparency (here, in German), and I don't see a significant advantage of having this data collected on this page. Can we remove it completely, please?

With this information, you can quickly turn your attention to the mentor's talk page and help newcomers if you see that the mentor has been away for too long. You also immediately understand that if a mentor has not been around for a long time, then he should be made inactive or excluded from the list, which will allow newcomers not to ask questions to an inactive mentor.

Hello @Tkarcher, thanks for the feedback and for helping bring that conversation to our attention!

I think @Iniquity describes our reasoning well:

In T321429#8348717, @Iniquity wrote:

With this information, you can quickly turn your attention to the mentor's talk page and help newcomers if you see that the mentor has been away for too long. You also immediately understand that if a mentor has not been around for a long time, then he should be made inactive or excluded from the list, which will allow newcomers not to ask questions to an inactive mentor.

Providing the "Last Active" info is not meant to be controlling or to create a competitive feeling. It was only meant to provide an easy way for mentors and admins to check in on the health of the mentorship program. The "Last Active" data is the date of last edit, easily available with a single click to the contributions page. In other words, it's not making any new info public, just making the data easier to parse for anyone who might want to check to ensure newcomers aren’t directing questions to an inactive mentor.

All that being said, we certainly want to continue to improve features based on community feedback, so if mentors at dewiki feel strongly that that column should be hidden, then please let us know. I could see a few options, including:

• Making the display of that data optional, and configurable in your wiki's Growth configuration. (We didn't do that initially because we have been trying to find a balance between making important features configurable while also trying to avoid making that configuration so long and overwhelming that it makes setting up Growth features overwhelming.)
• Removing the "Last Active" date entirely and perhaps pursuing a more automated system for removing inactive mentors: T321509 . (Although this is a lot of work and also likely something that we would want to be configurable by wiki).