Originally Posted by
tom911
Those decade-old rules have been modified several times since they were set.
In attempting to answer my own question this morning (
Canarsie's question motivated me to find the answers I seek myself) I found the latest Travel News guidelines drafted, I believe, about a week ago in response to this thread:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...ding-room.html
What's the difference between this forum and other forums? While an imprecise distinction, this forum is to discuss the articles themselves about a topic. Sometimes the topic itself could well be in another forum but one of your fellow FlyerTalkers put a link to an article here because he or she thought the article itself was worth discussing.
So, with that in mind, here are some guidelines for the forum:
Travel Newsis a place to discuss current general news articles that relate to travel in some way.
HOWEVER, topics that are primarily related to one airline (or hotel chain, or car company, etc.) OR are primarily about one locale (and for which there are lots of potential articles that could be cited) should usually be posted in the appropriate airline/hotel/car or destination forum. Again, this is the "periodicals reading room" and the published and linked-to articles themselves are the main thing here.
(bolds and italics are the author's)
Me, I love guidelines. That's why I insisted the TB operate by a set of them and took the lead in drafting the TalkBoard Guidelies. So let's dig into these Travel News guidelines in a quest to answer my question:
what actually belongs in the Travel News forum...if anything.
The simple guideline for inclusion is:
- A general news article that relates to travel in some way.
However, these guidelines provide most of their guidance by exception, ie, what CAN'T be posted in the forum that otherwise meets the simple guideline for inclusion:
- A thread that talks about the content or subject of the news article is not allowed. The thread must talk about the article itself.
- A thread without a link to a published article is not allowed.
- A thread related to one airline (or hotel chain, or car company, etc.) is not allowed and should be posted in the appropriate airline/hotel/car or destination forum.
- A thread primarily about one locale is not allowed and should be posted in the appropriate airline/hotel/car or destination forum.
Thing is, FlyerTalk pretty much has a forum for anything travel related. Every single airline in the world has a forum home. Same with hotels and cars. Every destination in the world as its own forum. Our special interest travel forums cover an incredible breadth of general travel issues. So after taking all of those topics away, the remit of Travel News ends up being incredibly narrow.
The only topics for articles I can think of would be those about commercial airframes and propulsion systems as well as articles about how current events (weather, war, disease, etc) are affecting travel but even then only if that effect is broader than regionally since every region in the world has its own forum. And both of those topics get a lot of coverage in TravelBuzz anyway.
But more to the point, does anyone
really only want to talk about a news article itself? Aren't we here to talk about the issues of travel (ie, the content of travel articles) rather than the news articles themselves.
It's almost like a nearly impossible game to try to identify a news article that actually belongs in Travel News. As a result few articles get posted. And many of those get locked and moved because the game is so darn hard. And that makes the forum low velocity. So low that it has relatively few visitors, so even when someone rolls a snake-eyes and finds an article that fits the narrow remit, only a fraction of FlyerTalkers see it compared to if it had been posted in TravelBuzz.
Originally Posted by intuition
That was my rationale behind posting that specific link to TN.
It's a hard, hard game!
Perhaps if the article was about a trend of A359s used by different airlines having mechanical issues (as the 787 had) it would have fit the incredibly narrow remit of Travel News as described in the current guidelines. So long as the
article itself was worth discussing. @:-)
I suspect Travel News made a lot more sense before FT had a forum for any and everything travel related. But now it does and Travel News is anachronistically out of step with how FlyerTalk is currently organized, making it redundant.