bridgeair

Suggest that Mileage Run deals be split into US domestic, and international.

The majority of mileage runs posted are US domestic (normally no interest to me).
Splitting off the international ones (i.e. to/from US and wholely outside US) would be very helpful.

RSonny2010

I strongly agree!

tcook052

My personal opinion is that further subdividing the MR forums would not draw enough of a real benefit to offset the greater degree of confusion doing so would create. That is merely MHO, however.

goalie

And I merely agree with you

Jenbel

I think it's a great idea. I never visit MR because for me, the forum is swamped with flights I'm never going to use since I'm not in the US. With an 'international' section, the non-Americans might actually get more of a chance to use the forum.

Also, what makes a fare 'good' can be different in Europe, the land of high fuel surcharges from the US.

I would ask that American based TB members try to consider this both from their home based viewpoint, but also from the viewpoint of European/non-US members, who currently find the forum of much less value, so creating a self-fulfilling cycle of it being predominantly US based.

kokonutz

I'm open to the notion...but only if Jenbel refrains from further implications that the TB is too America-centric.

Srsly though, this is a fine idea.

What ever happened to splitting out a sub-forum for premium cabin 'great deals' instead of forcing them all into a single thread, while we are at it!?

qvzn

This would also benefit those US-based FT'ers that can only do MRs that don't leave the country

Everybody wins ^

BiziBB

bridgeair,
There are alternatives to your subdivision suggestion.

One alternative is to allow threads to have tags, which can be used as filters, so that you can set MR Deals to be US-domestic, US-International, International, Premium-fare, airline-specific, alliance-specific or some other criteria.

Here is an example of tags: you could tag US-MR, US-Int-MR, Int-US-MR, Int-It-MR etc
http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/main/thread_tagging


I am not a software developer or internet forum administrator, but there are some wise and experienced people on FT who could discuss this option.

Some drawbacks of subdividing a MR forum into sub-forums is that it multiplies the time to find a good deal or some information, it makes a doubling or tripling of work for volunteer moderators and would require moderators to go and move maybe hundreds (or more?) deals into a new forum, when your wish could be granted with a more elegant solution.

I highly recommend that you read some older TalkBoard proposal threads for adding new forums to Mileage Run Deals. It will entertain you for a while!

I hope that this suggestion is useful for anyone considering slicing up the MR Forum.

PS. Suggestions are welcome regarding improving the usability of the MR forums: you can post a question or suggestion in MR Discussion.
It might be useful to raise this issue in the MR Discussion forum, since you would be impacting on many thousands of FTers and they would likely have an interest and want a say, rather than flipping the issue for a TalkBoard decision before it's discussed by MR Forum users!

Regards,
BiziBB, Moderator Mileage Run forums

PainCorp

Can I suggest we add airline alliance sub-threads? One for each of the alliances would be a very easy way to quickly spot what applies to what you need and what doesn't, without potentially having to go down the whole list.

BiziBB

Tags could allow this kind of filtering, along with US-Int MR, US-MR, Int-Int-MR tags.

arthabaska

(first post, yay!)

Organization can only help so much..although I would be in favor of adding a section for fares originating from outside the US--I'm crediting to MP but will be based in Europe most of this year, despite how it might fragment listings and lower the visibility of reversible fare possibilities.

I would suggest that the forum software itself is the main limitation. Tags could be helpful, sure, but we're really limited by 1) transparency of the fare rules and 2) our ability to categorize fares. It would be nice to have a system that could have the entire fare loaded into the topic as support sorting by carrier, destination, and origin, and have a concept of permitted routes and MPM rules, and -then- a discussion thread under it. But that's probably a bit futuristic.

That all said, tags could be a useful start. Also, the ability to sort the thread list by date started would help immensely (is this available?).

arthabaska

Good idea, however then we would miss out on interesting matches from competing airlines.

N830MH

Me, too. I agree as well. They have kept separately the US domestic & international.

I think it's excellent idea! ^^This should kept separate US-International-MR trip, Domestic USA-MR trip, & international-international as well.