seanthepilot

It is important to understand WHY these fares last for years. Part of the reason is BECAUSE they are buried in the threads and hard to weed out. You have fallen victim to the solution. In the same manner that the trick-it thread is hidden in the discussion forum, HIDING these fares HELP to keep the great fares alive.


I think this above poster has summed it up well. The status quo helps people passionate about these fares get their email updates. And because they are a frustrating layout is one of their reasons that some of these fares have some decent longevity.

To those who want the change, consider that designed forums may ruin the fares you're trying to organize.

We can call it the "Graveyard of Once Good Premium Fares forum"

tcook052

I don't believe further dividing the MR topic would draw enough of a benefit to offset the confusion it would create.

whimike

I support a sub-forum for Premium Fares, simply because the current thread is unwieldy and impossible to concentrate a discussion on a single fare. We tend to have discussions in the thread about a particular fare and the actual premium fares get lost amongst those discussions and leads to a lot of moderator intervention.

A good analogy is the desk of a messy person. He likes it that way because he actually knows where every little thing is on his desk. But, most just find the desk cluttered and barely usable. If someone were to clean the desk, most will find it far better, but that messy person will be upset because now his system has been ruined and he can't find anything.

We need a clean de-cluttered forum for it to really be useable.

seanthepilot

I think you don't understand why these threads are so successful...


This is the purpose of these threads. To have the fares exist AMONGST lots of clutter. That way, all members who spend a little bit of time can find them. Those who don't know, or are too lazy to dig (just pointing out, not pointing fingers) don't find them at all.... and many times the fare longevity is increased because of the clutter. In fact, I am in favor of not deleting the jibber jabber, as the off topic discussions make for perfect distraction material.

Just my opinion. It ain't broke, don't fix it! :P

whimike

The real "meat' in the premium fares thread are often culled by the bloggers and thus I really question whether having them buried is what really keeps them going. I think keeping the status quo because it is cluttered and messy and thus provides protection against misuse of the contents is a far stretch. The same buried fares will be several pages off the main thread page if there were a new sub-forum, accomplishing much of the same goal, but at least it is more usable and organized.

In my ideal world the Good Deal Premium Fares would be a restricted sub-forum that had certain requirements to get access to, such as being a person that has contributed a good deal premium fare. What bothers me more than anything are people always take and never give, they are often the people that also call the airlines and do other things to kill the deal as they are takers and not givers, i.e. only out for themselves.

crimson12

I think splitting things up further would create more confusion than it would solve. And, although there is some discussion "about" the fares (rather than just posting the good deals) in the existing thread, I don't think there's so much of it that a new forum is needed.

Remember, if a new forum is created, then every single fare will need its own thread. That seems like overkill, especially when lots of these fares generate only 1 or 2 posts.

ainternational

Why overkill if we do this for every other fare/route in the main forum?!

checkerboard

And this is exactly the point.

The main MR forum is organized very well for economy-class. Since Premium Fares are more expensive, they seldom fit into the narrow (though appropriate) CPM vision that guides those posts.

For example, a $1300 one-way fare from CMB to LAX wouldn't meet the normal criteria for a MR. However, if it's for First-class travel on EK, the subject remains interesting.

I've spent a fair bit of time looking for information about good-deal fares from Southeast Asia to South America (or indeed, to anywhere else, provided I could insert a stopover in Brazil). My feeling is that FT must have some good info about fares for this purpose (maybe one of the ex-CMB fares that's very liberal in its MPM). But search terms for this aren't so obvious, and I haven't been able to successfully navigate the 1000s of pages of single-year threads to find it otherwise.

[I've even tried setting the forum to "print mode," in the hope that I could get 1000 posts on a page, allowing for quick searching. But as FT limits this to 40 posts - which makes for a mindnumbing amount of clicking to find what I need. There must be a better way.]

To be clear: I'm not looking for ephemeral mistake fares - but rather, "Good Deal Premium Fares."

In short, a forum structure, rather than a thread, would more easily allow me to find what I'm looking for.

Kagehitokiri

i would personally read a premium deal forum, and i dont think im alone

i dont really look at any of those forums/threads right now, because i dont do mileage runs and id only be interested in flatbed deals

armagebedar

As is being discussed in the Premium Deals thread, one factor that would be critical to the success of such a forum would be the conditions of viewing. There is always much concern over deals (especially F/C deals) being killed after being posted on that thread, which tends to drive discussion underground. That is a shame, and a simple fix would be to only allow members with a certain number of posts / tenure / etc. to view such a thread/forum. If this system works for Coupon Connection, why can't it work elsewhere?

As long as this remains "broken", the Premium Deals thread won't really reach its full potential, IMO, and people will remain wary of posting anything for fear the airlines will move to correct it.

lo2e

What's to prevent someone who is trying (knowingly or unknowingly) to "kill" the deals from getting to x posts and y days of membership fairly quickly, thereby gaining access to the special forum, and would just go about their business again? And how would you know if someone that was doing something to "kill" the deals didn't already have the x posts and y days met, so they could access it already?

This was the exact same argument when creating a forum inside Mileage Run with an x posts/y days restriction was debated here in the TB Topics forum a while back, and subsequently was not adopted. There were other factors as well, but this seemed to be the biggest reason to not create such a forum.

FlyerChrisK

A separate forum would make it easier to quickly watch new fares pop up with Google Reader than the current subscription system seems to allow.

I doubt a private forum will truly stay private if the airlines want to invest themselves in patrolling FT for mistake fares.

tcook052

While I understand fully what you're saying CC is much more a straightforward swap meet with one-time items that have a fairly static and often limited value whereas fare deals can be milked for months or longer so can potentially hold a far greater value to the right person or group of people.

That said I've long lobbied for a minimum post count to view MR Deals forum as it never seemed to be too much of an ask to require enrolling and signing on to view what we regard as having value. That is only MHO and it's okay that YMMV.

armagebedar

The idea is not to stop deals from being killed -- that is impossible. Rather, the idea is to only allow contributing members of the community to have access to said deals, thus perhaps encouraging some responsibility around their distribution and discussion. It would also give other members more encouragement to post deals knowing that abuse, while not disappearing entirely, would likely diminish as a result of the more controlled audience.

Mistake fares will be noticed and corrected -- it's just a matter of time. (I once used an ex-Japan mistake fare that was not made public in blogs or forums as far as I could tell, and it was corrected within two weeks.) However, legitimate-but-cheap fares may remain extant for quite some time -- unless they are abused. The idea here is to reduce the potential for abuse from FT, which is why I agree with the idea of implementing some nominal threshold for viewing.

Microwave

I agree--I also support splitting premium MR Deals into a separate sub-forum. I also agree that access restrictions would make sense: it isn't difficult for a dedicated, interested new member to reach the modest thresholds in place for other access-restricted fora.