Thanks for your response Chex.

I most certainly do agree that the FT Travel forum has been enhanced and is a great place for special concern forums, i.e., Travel with Children, Online Booking and Bidding, Travel Technology, Women Travelers, Cruises, and GLBT. I believe that folks who are familiar with Flyer Talk will eventually find their way to these forums and find great value there.

Obviously many experienced posters who just want a fun place to relax, act silly and enjoy themselves seek out OMNI and really don't care where it is located. Travel Buzz also seems to enjoy good traffic from experienced posters.

Those issues are clear.

Let's for a moment, however, forget about everything we know about Flyer Talk and pretend that we are a true newbie who just happens to show up at www.flyertalk.com

Maybe they were surfing the net and found a link, read an article, went to a seminar, were referred by a friend, client, vendor, seatmate or newly met friend in an airport bar. Doesn't matter how they get here but the fact is that when they get here the first thing they see is "FT Miles".

Miles are what's happening. Miles are a national, no wait an international, addiction, so the newbie clicks on FT Miles.
Miles are what made FT happen and what keep it running.

The newbies proceed to check out the site and see lots of very interesting threads that have nothing on earth to do with miles, i.e., Community, Itineraries, Trip Reports, News, Coupon Connection, Talkboard Issues, and to tell the truth, a big percentage of the airline, hotel (why isn't the luxury hotel forum in hotels??), car, credit card, etc., do not relate to issues that relate to miles.

So then the newbie has a general question and is not sure where to post it so s/he posts it in Miles Buzz (which for years what the general topic forum, presumably because that was the intuitive place for it to be) and then WHAMO! the poor newbie gets flamed by the Post Nazis for posting in the wrong place. This is not a very effective way to welcome or encourage relative newbies. The relative newbies get discouraged and leave. If we really want Flyer Talk to continue to grow, we need to be very sensitive to the needs and concerns of the new poster.


Even worse, well at least just as bad, is the huge number of very valuable contributors (who at one time posted daily) who now only show up once every 6 months to a year. Why? Well some say they have left because of the mean-spirited aggressive (Post Nazi) behavior that has developed since the onset of "the right place".

FlyerTalk became the amazing place that it is because it was allowed to grow naturally, like a weed, to meet the needs of those who wandered by/in and invested their time, energy and money to make this a very, very special place.

Do we need structure as we grow? Of course. But that structure needs to be ligical, welcoming and above all needs to make intuitive sense to the new and old posters alike.

Yes I have asked the same questions over and over, exactly because I have never received a logical answer to these very simple questions.

On FT Miles the experiment of making Miles Buzz a "miles only" forum is an obvious failure--people just don't get the agenda. This is clearly witnessed by the fact that at any given time somewhere betwee 25% to 35% of posts on that forum get bounced out because they "don't fit".

How hard can this be? The people who first post on FT Miles need a General Travel forum on FT Miles or else FT Miles needs to be totally revamped to include absolutely nothing but miles posts. This would mean that all the most popular forums would have to be moved to FT Travel which would probably even more dramatically reduce the traffic and post by seasoned travelers.

So I am down once again to asking the heretofore unanswered question:

1. Is there some reason that FT Miles cannot support a General Travel forum?

2. Is there some reason that the General Travel forum cannot be at the top of FT Miles?

If the current system is broken (as evidenced by the huge number of locked and bounced posts on Miles Buzz) is there some specific resistance to trying to fix it?

To me it is blatantly obvious that FT Miles needs a general forum. What am I missing here?