Long threads
When something is announced at AA we often like to speculate on the details before they are fully known. One such example was the seating on the new 77W plane - a thread was started in January discussing the best business and first class seat. That thread was a fascinating read at the time, it developed as people were able to see the inside of the plane and then travel on it. The thread is now a consolidated thread where more recent questions get merged in at the end with a great wiki summary at the top.

11 months on we now have a thread with:
* A great wiki post at the top of every page.
* Speculation at the start of the thread.
* Useful info in the middle once people had started flying.
* Repetitive questions towards the end of the thread.

This does hide some of the most valuable information in the middle of the thread which does make it harder to find. The problem is compounded by the search feature which by default will ignore short terms (eg 4A, 31A or 77W). I know you can work around this by using quotation marks, but the average person just entering the site from google isn't going to know that - it would be nice if someone could fix the forum's source code.

May be useful to have key milestones linked to from the wiki (eg here is the first post from someone who flew on the plane). May also be useful to delete repetitive questions and pm the user with a link to where they should be looking to avoid cluttering up the thread. Would definitely be useful to fix the search to not ignore short requests. This would reduce the appearance of snark and also make searching easier...


Googling common threads
Another interesting phenomenon is when google (or other search engines) return a recent thread rather than the most relevant thread. Try searching for 'AA best award availability tool' on google and you will be directed to a flyertalk post telling someone they asked their question in the wrong forum.

Why does this happen? Maybe the newer thread had better terms so it was picked up by the search engine? Maybe the real answer is in an old thread that google thinks is no longer relevant. But whatever the reason - we should be careful to remember that people searching google are going to find a thread discussing the topic, and it may be the most recent boring repetitive one!

Chat room?

Most of us are probably only too happy to answer questions in person from our friends and colleagues about traveling on AA. In the real world I don't expect person A to realize that person B asked me the same question a month ago - I'll just answer the question for person A again.

This forum is large enough that there is probably someone on here 24/7 so maybe a chatroom (less permanent than a forum) could be used for the basic questions? A bit like the flame free thread but more live? This would avoid the repetitive requests coming up in search results?

Any thoughts? I'm happy to be pm'd