I would be interested in meeting other FT'ers while on the go. However I have some problems with the current Flight Connect that has made me hold back on participating. I think that the basics have been mentioned above but I would like to give my 2 cents as well.
- It is too tedious to add new flights. Everybody traveling often is using an app like TripIt - and all of these apps offer free APIs. My travel plans should sync automagically, preferably based on a flag or keyword that I set in the flight details. For example if I put #FT in the notes section, that means FT may pull the info. No flag - the flight data stays private.
- Privacy. Firstly it is known that public flight info will be messed with, so certain details should never be visible (PNR, E-ticket, last name, etc).
The second reason may be more specific to me personally: When I travel for work the destination is often quite sensitive. My base is in AMS so I can always share when I am in AMS for an outbound flight, but the flight itself (and destination) should not be published for these kind of trips. On the return the airports and flight data may be published - but only from around the moment that I arrive at the airport.
So these are some very specific rules to make it possible, for me personally, to post my flight info. I'm assuming that everybody has such rules - probably different ones than mine, but similar in structure. These things should therefore be configurable. Either through the FT interface, or through the notes that we put in the TripIt flight segment.
Regarding access to the data: Limiting it to only registered members is not going to stop anybody. Even search engine crawlers often have ways around this nowadays. Better would be a minimum number of posts (eg 1000), or even better, allowing to configure a whitelist of members (or people with postcount higher than X in subforum Y). I'd like to decide myself who has access to my data, rather than it being a generic rule.
I'm realising that these may be pages full of configuration options and I am fully expecting that this will be too much effort to implement. Seeing the state of the board nowadays (
Months after the latest upgrade there is still an annoying bug redirecting me to some random old thread after login) I'm not sure if there is the technical willingness and knowhow to actually implement such features. But being an engineer myself - these are the kind of things that I personally would like to see
