mia

Agreed, but there's no basis to criticize those who post such questions here when the Read Me sticky invites them to do so.

Credit card signup bonuses have changed the logic. It used to be that one chose an airline (or two) and looked for opportunities to earn miles in that program, including credit cards. Now, we have a wave of members for whom the process has been reversed - collect a series of unrelated card bonuses first, learn about the airlines, hotel chains and their programs later.

If a separate forum were created, would sufficient knowledgeable members visit it to provide assistance? If not, how would the questions be answered?

PainCorp

If they legitimately tried and got stumped they don't get "flamed." The only ones getting "flamed" are the ones with one post asking basic questions, usually in a new thread, that have been covered in depth.

mia brings up an excellent point. While most experienced FTers would probably avoid it, I believe the people that are already doing their research, posting in the correct places, and getting legitimately stumped would get frustrated if they were quarantined to this new forum.

I think it's a great idea, but the implementation is going to be a PITA.

Here's a suggestion:
In certain forums you need so many posts and a join date so old, like Coupon Connection, etc, do this for MilesBuzz!, and the CC forums for creating a new thread. This way, it will hopefully cause them to read, and post in the appropriate forum. While this won't help with posts in existing threads that have been covered in depth for the last 10 pages, it should help with excessing threads that are redundant.

abcx

Yes, I would visit it. I would post a link to the bloggers' award booking services. They are the guys who got all these people started on this CC churning business. They can clean up the mess. They even make money in the process.

FT is not about helping people who have never contributed anything to learn how to travel for free. That's what the blogs are for - that's how they make their money.

I never blamed the people for posting here. I asked to create another forum. Or put them all in one stickied thread so that we don't have half the forum taken up by it.

And how is this my problem or "Buzz about Miles" if you don't have a strategy to redeem points before signing up for a CC?

PainCorp

I agree completely about the blogger comment, this could also touch on the vote that was just completed about creating a blogger forum. Maybe all of these threads could be shuffled there, as a majority of them are sent here from blogs.

Mountain Trader

I very much agree with your observation, and let me also thank you for the high quality of moderating which you provide-that too is sadly becoming a lost art.

I'm afraid my answer to your question takes the tough path. I think new FTers should be thinking about how they want to use their miles and points before or at least while they are pursuing them. A good credit card can still yield miles worth $1,000 or more if used wisely. Yet, as you point out in summary, many do not spend even an hour looking at what they are getting and what they can do with it.

I think cluttering Miles Buzz just to force everyone to read such posts seems a disservice to both the readers and FT. Putting these requests in a seperate place would, I think, eventually raise the quality of questions to meet the quality of answers provided. Put another way, if no one posts to list the airports in Croatia, eventually someone will go look it up and the level of dialogue will have been bumped up a notch.

deant

I believe a significant number of people would visit the "new" forum and try to help THOSE THAT HAVE DONE SOME RESEARCH and are more than just "one and done" type people. If you look at one of the threads, the person has very few posts and specifically said "thanks for helping me get the miles now help me make the booking.

TravelerMSY

I would. You have to give action to get it, and it's also a way to pay it forward.

StreetSmartTraveler

That's true. Maybe remove this text out of the "Welcome to MilesBuzz! Read me first!" sticky:

PainCorp

I think for this topic to be pursued further, we need a more concise idea of how we want to fix this, in order to submit it to the TalkBoard to be voted on.

I see two sides to this:

1) Move all these posts with the people that want, what I will refer to as "big red arrows," to have their hand held and point them at exactly what they need to do. We could also refer to this as "The Blogger Problem"

2) Limit new thread posting in Credit Card forums and MilesBuzz! to users with more than 30 days tenure and more than 25, 50, etc posts of value. This could be used to ensure that new users are given the time to read existing threads, and, also, comment in them. If a user is new enough, mods could be alerted to that user to check qualification of post quality.

What do you all think of these two ideas?

PainCorp

The problem is, most of these users are not reading, so what's in the sticky is rarely read by them.

mia

I do not understand the notion that anyone is "forced" to read a thread. Why do you read these? (I mean "you" collectively, not only the two posters whom I quoted.) I find they are easy to identify from the Titles, and I try to clean up the Titles that are uselessly vague. I do take the point about clutter, but why not just skip over these?

First we need to have a place to send them.

abcx

Why have sub forums? Just put everything in one forum and we'll skip over the ones we're not interested in.

Seriously, you're a mod?

PainCorp

Here is my suggestion:

ArizonaGuy

By that logic, I shouldn't be concerned if I see Delta topics discussed in the JetBlue forum. I should just skip them because I'm not forced to read them.

I'm in a CPAP forum. Literally. One forum, not one separate forum or any organization of threads of any kind. It's a clusterf*ck to sort through pages and pages of topics, so much so that I stopped participating.

The mods there claim that because they have a higher percentage of older users who lack technical understanding (ageist, much?) and are likely delirious because of sleep trouble (really?) that it makes more sense to leave everything in complete disarray.

Riiiiight. FT heading down this road, apparently.

josephstern

I like the idea of the mods just dumping all of these threads into one "Help!" thread. The mods are generally happy to clean things up around here - they just need to agree that these all deserve consolidation.

Frankly, if done, that thread could be a pretty encyclopedic database of how to book award travel.