Randy Petersen

A topic worthy of research and reply, thanks.

I realized it would be a challenge to compile all the attributes for the comments, so my apologies in advance to the unnamed Volunteers whose actual words I'm incorporating into this reply. First and foremost, to properly understand the art and science of thread merger and the size of these threads once merged, one has to fully appreciate that it quite often depends on the forum and its community as well as the best practices of the volunteers within that forum and of course the actual topic. One can easily be mislead by thinking they understand how thread merger is being implemented. Here’s a perfect example. Not long ago I read a message from a member who was convinced they had a smoking gun to prove to me that the United forum was over merged. And I’ll actually give you an updated snapshot of that smoking gun: AAdvantage forum – 14 threads with “merged” in the titles; OnePass forum – 46 threads with “merged” in the titles; SkyMiles forum – 65 threads with “merged” in the titled and Mileage Plus – over 500 threads with “merged” in their titles. There it is, proof positive that the United forum is over merged. Well, not really. You see, the use of “merged” in the thread title is not a standard among the volunteers and in fact the United volunteers themselves came up with this best practice and to date it has not been adopted or considered for implementation for the other forums. This means that the smoking gun referred to in this example is likely a cap pistol.

The United forum is a bit different than many of our other forums – one, because it is by far the most active travel forum on FlyerTalk which means it has a higher percentage of members actively posting. If a new promo is pushed out or a new UA policy adopted, it's not uncommon to have at least three separate threads started on it within a short time, sometimes minutes apart. When you have a forum this active, judicious pruning is very time consuming and as a result, much of the activity that you want to attribute to the action of the Moderators, and I’ve stressed this point before, is actually a result of the members of the forum itself as a large majority of any calls for a thread merger come from the active members of that forum. In an unscientific poll among several volunteers, it was compiled that an estimated 98% of the merged threads were because a member or members started a duplicate thread on the same topic and this often comes about because the original thread was buried a few pages back or because the original thread title was not very descriptive.

And as noted, it quite often depends on the forum and its community. For instance, the Moderators in the AAdvantage forum have found that some long running consolidated threads have turned into a sort of help desk.

One of the great posts when I asked our Moderators for input on the topic of merged threads, came from volunteer cblaisd who posted this up:
“I want to suggest an analogy. One can see FT as a concierge or one can see it as a library (these aren't perfect, but I think they convey what I'm going to try to get at). There are folks, often newbies, low-timers, or sporadic posters, who have a particular question they need an answer to quickly. They hope that FT will be like a concierge where they can pose the question and have it answered. As with a concierge, they want (and if FT is a concierge, can expect to get) personalized service that is brief and to-the-point.

But in my estimation, FT functions best -- both as a community and as a repository of information -- when it serves more as a library. To use a library well, you need to spend some time with it, you need to give some attention to those who have waded through the same thickets you want to wade through, and you need to consider the community that has developed in developing and maintaining that body of knowledge. In this analogy, moderators function as librarians, pointing people to a body of knowledge that can be helpful.

I think it would not be good to paint with too broad or simplistic a brush here. Are there "consolidated" threads that are unwieldly? Maybe. But, at the same time, when a poster (often a new one) comes on and asks "What's the best way to Waikiki from HNL?" it is of greater service to him/her -- and more respectful, IMO, of the FT community that has labored to amass a body of helpful knowledge -- to point the person to the consolidated thread in the Hawai`i forum that discusses this topic. A side benefit is that the person asking the question will learn a lot about the various permutations (pros/cons of the Waikiki Express, which car company generally has decent one way rentals between HNL and a satellite office in Waikiki, which companies are in west versus east Waikiki, etc.)

There are certainly "concierge" type sources out there; YahooAnswers is one. But the value of the information on those sites is pretty low precisely because there is no community involvement or investment or pride in creating a body of helpful knowledge.

Now, I do suspect that part of the rise in frustration is rooted in IB's execrable job of making the most basic of IT functions -- search -- work in any consistent, stable, useful manner.
But I fear any broad "solution" of disallowing (not that anyone has suggested that yet) consolidated threads will ultimately do a disservice to FT and to the folks who come here for both information and community.”

So there you have it, FlyerTalk is either a concierge service of travel knowledge or a library of that knowledge with its consolidated threads. And as cblaisd points out, the helpful nature of search has until recently been very well documented as being a real problem for all members to use since IB took over the job of hosting FlyerTalk. That has been fixed to a great degree and we’re now in a far better place to suggest and use search that we have been over the past 2 years.

I would hope that given the choice of a situation of having a newbie posting a question that has been asked and answered before and getting welcomed with "search is your friend" and other snarky remarks both of which could lead to having the post closed by a moderator, or having it merged; the latter seems most user-friendly.

Is merging threads a science? Not really. It’s more likely an art, and being so makes it imperfect. Do the volunteers of FlyerTalk occasionally make a mistake when considering a suggested merger of threads? Yep, they do, just as the members who suggest those same merged threads do. It’s likely that 95% of the thread mergers are the correct call, but we aren’t discussing those, only the ones that do not seem to make sense. But to their credit, we have also seen threads de-merged as a result of another look at how the thread is wove with information once it has been merged. I think you’ll find that many of our volunteers will and do take the time to review a thread once a merger has taken place. The only caveat for any member thinking and suggesting such a review, is that oftentimes there will be other members who like and see the merger as a positive decision. So please consider the other members who also can make points for the thread merger and at the end of the day, it just becomes a judgment as to which members suggestions were followed.

This core of regulars who make suggestions re: thread mergers are extremely helpful in assisting our volunteers do their job that much better. But it is usually a much more involved process these days. The volunteers often will email each other several times a day to discuss a thread merger or to review the current list of suggested mergers by other members. This action that you see the result of is certainly not capricious by nature.

I do think that if you were to push back the examples of past thread mergers and simply notice the same thing in today’s more current process of FlyerTalk, you’d see that it’s likely better managed and again, that is partially because search and other things on FlyerTalk have improved. But the role of these merged threads remains vital to FlyerTalk and that is to strengthen the signal to noise ratio of the volume of travel information on FlyerTalk.

Merged threads remains a constant topic among our volunteers and as for the length of some of these merged threads? Well, there’s good news there. Many of the volunteers have begun some time ago to archiving longer merged threads into annual threads so that the accumulation of information can be polled in a calendar year with links working backwards for prior information on the same topic. This is certainly a work in progress and will be part of the agenda items that we discuss and implement as best practices at our annual ModTraining Do’s.

Appreciate your interest in the more refined matters of the art of thread merger and it is this same type of interest from our members that helps FlyerTalk get better as we continue to refine the fine points of managing and running a Web site the size of FlyerTalk.

As an aside, with half the year gone by, FlyerTalk already has more than one million posts for the year. That’s a new record for information being posted to FlyerTalk and why it even more important to listen to topics such as this when trying to simplify the information being posted.