Adam Smith

Hello everyone,

Your friendly neighbourhood moderators have recently received feedback from a number of people about a few things relating to the organization of the forum. Some good points have been made, and we would like to try to make the forum more useful, especially since we have twice as many moderators as we did a few months ago! Rather than set about just doing this all ourselves based on what we think is best, we thought we'd throw it out to the membership more broadly for some combination of suggestions and assistance.

Some specific points we've heard a few times are that the main thread on the 2020 Aeroplan re-launch is getting unwieldy and that the big forum FAQ (long maintained just by @tcook052) could use some freshening up, but there are probably other areas for improvement.

A couple of notes, keeping in mind that we're trying to get things cleaned up.

• If you have a suggestion for a new thread on a topic, or that we should retire an old one, please don't go out and start a new one; it may be better for the moderators to carve off part of an existing thread to form the basis of a new one. We also don't want five people creating a new thread for IT issues because they've decided the existing one is two big, for example. Just post here.
• We'd appreciate some input from the community, but keep in mind that there may be differing views, and ultimately the moderators will make the call on what action to take on any given item.
• This thread is not meant to be a venue for complaints about past moderator actions and why certain posts or threads were moved, deleted, merged, split off, etc. Constructive forward-looking discussion, please

With that in mind, we would appreciate your input Feedback is welcome from any and all. That includes those who mostly lurk or spend most of their FT time in other fora!

Those interested in providing assistance once decisions have been made are also welcome to declare themselves; @yyznomad is known for his excellent wiki skills, and I believe that @Bohemian1 may have volunteered himself to update the FAQ thread during one of the virtual Dos...

We'll leave this up for at least a few days and see what feedback comes in. We may start to take action on some of the items right away, or it may take a while (the moderators are volunteers, and you get what you pay for ), but we'll try to move this along at a reasonable pace.

Adam Smith & tcook052
AC Forum Co-Moderators

Adam Smith

To kick off the discussion, here are a few items for consideration that I've thought of:

• We have a growing number of threads about certain aspects of Aeroplan 2.0, which is reducing the amount of traffic in the existing mega-thread, but are there any others that we're missing? Off the top of my head, a dedicated thread on family sharing, which hasn't seen much discussion yet? Is there use in a general thread on credit card benefits that are the same across the three card issuers, i.e. "I didn't get my rollover from my TD VIP card" belongs in the TD thread, but "if I cancel my black Aeroplan credit card on January 5 before my rollover SQM have posted, am I still entitled to them?" goes in the general CC benefits thread? Or is it too hard to parse those?
  
  
• We have a bunch of massive threads (several thousand posts) on the forum for topics dating back many years. For example, the OP of the North America meal service thread dates from 2009. Some other airline forums on FT carve out annual threads, like we do with the lounge thread (or maybe less than annual but every few years). Would that make them more useful?
  
  
• Are there any mega-threads other than the Aeroplan 2020 re-launch thread that should be split in to separate threads going forward?
  
  
• Conversely, are there any topics on which we have multiple threads that are confusing and/or duplicative and should be merged?
  
  
• How important is consistency over time in thread titles? For instance, the thread on bid upgrades has been titled "Question: Air Canada implements bidding for J upgrades" since was launched 4.5 years ago. The program has been up and running for several years, and now also includes PY. "Air Canada bid upgrade program" might be a more fitting title, but is there value in the familiarity of keeping the titles the same over time?
  
  
• Are there any important threads that should be stickied to the top of the forum alongside the (hopefully soon revised) FAQ?
  
  
• Wikis seem like a good solution to keeping information up to date in longer threads. But how often do people actually refer to them?

Bohemian1

As Adam has noted, my hobby horse would be a complete update and overhaul of the Air Canada & Aeroplan 101; The Flyertalk Air Canada Forum FAQ. It's way out of date and details of the new program are well enough known that we could start populating the updated info. When I was a FOTSG, I would go there to find out the highlights and then hit one of the more detailed threads linked to get the details.

The good news is that a lot of those detailed threads already exist.

Some need minimal clean up (2020 Air Canada Aeroplan Program and 2021 AC Status Privileges come to mind). And some probably need no clean up (Million Miles Recognition from AC for example).

But some threads need significant updates and pruning which could warrant locking the old content and migrating the rest of the posts to a new thread (FAQ: How to Upgrade on Air Canada and Air Canada introduces zoned boarding to name but two). I have no idea how easy any of that is on our forum system though.

Or we could change the current structure and simply promote some of the above topics to sticky threads like they do on the UA forum. But the AC FAQ as it exists today has simply incorrect or irrelevant information now. Like I said, it's my hobby horse and may not be the highest priority in any triage effort.

And yeah, I'd be willing to help chip away at some of this.

Adam Smith

(I'll note that @tcook052 and I discussed the first couple posts of this thread in detail before I put them up, but from here on out, I'm speaking for myself unless otherwise noted)

@Bohemian1, thanks for some quick and constructive feedback! If you're willing to have a go at updating the FAQ, I'd say give'r. Perhaps start in an offline form and then we can figure out whether we want to post it to a locked sticky again or what.

Is there really any clean-up required to the 2021 privileges thread? I thought that one was a pretty clean discussion. Or are you just thinking a wiki is needed?

Perhaps I'll share some context on the technical aspects moving, merging, and so on.

• Merging threads is super easy for the most part. A few clicks and a bit of typing.
• Moving individual posts from one thread to another is fairly easy. But there's no way to batch or mass select posts. Every additional post requires scrolling a bit more and ticking a box to select it, so the workload grows in fairly linear fashion with the number of posts being moved.

The logistical challenge with merging threads is that many people don't use quotes in their replies. If you merge threads that have been active during the same period, it can therefore get very confusing to follow who is replying to whom and what they're talking about. If we decided that we didn't need a "How to Upgrade on Air Canada" and "E-Upgrades for a Newbie", we likely wouldn't actually merge those two threads given the potential for confusion. We would simply close one with a note to see the other thread that's remaining open.

The only way to hive posts off in to a new thread is to select each post to be moved and then move them to a new thread. (Or to duplicate original thread and delete all the ones you don't want in the old one, which is essentially the same thing).

So if we decided that the zoned boarding thread, for instance, had become unwieldy and needed to be split, the solutions that would be practical would be (a) pick a fairly recent point at which to bifurcate the thread, move those posts to a new thread, and lock the old thread or (b) start a new thread and lock the old one. If we picked 1/1/21 as the date (2021 onwards), we would be carving out two posts to form the new thread. Very manageable. But I would probably not make it 2020 onwards, because that would require us to move about 100 posts, which is pretty time consuming. So the moderator's task becomes finding a logical point to bifurcate that's not onerous from a workload perspective. The new year is often a good one, but certain events can also make good triggers, e.g. a new mobile app thread was started in fall 2019 when AC launched its new app, and the old one was closed (or maybe it has just died of natural causes).

There's also a question of whether it's useful to have a detailed OP to kick off a new thread that's being split out. Take the Everyday Status thread. Was it more helpful for me to launch that with a detailed post, or would it have been equally useful to the community if I had grabbed some random post from the 2020 Aeroplan thread on that subject and then put my info in a wiki instead? I tend to lean towards a detailed OP being valuable, but would like to hear what others think.

Part of why we wanted to open this up the community is that we're just two people, and only have a certain amount of time to dedicate to FT. Updating the FAQ might or might not be one of the top priorities for us to do, but if you were to work on that, and other folks were to chip in on other items, we could accomplish a lot more (and some people might see their pet projects get more attention this way ). Obviously only the moderators have the ability to move posts, merge and lock threads, etc, but things like wikis or detailed thread kick-off posts can be done by anyone (providing we're coordinating so we're using our efforts efficiently ).

Bohemian1

Thanks for the detailed analysis. I figured that some of this would be grunt work but had to through out my half-assed suggestion anyway.

I'll take your suggestion to start looking at the FAQ offline. No timeline here, I will probably just pick away at it and share the results with you two when I have something concrete. Suggestions from anyone are welcome.

canadiancow

I generally agree with this, but one thing I'll note is that I'm currently the "author" of the "Understanding the United Upgrade List Comprehensively" thread due to when it was split into a new one.

I cringe every time I see that on the UA forum.

Adam Smith

Given how much people love to complain about the organization of the forum, I'm surprised at how little feedback this has drawn so far

Much of moderation is grunt work, unfortunately But I'm happy to take on a bit more of that to help make this place more useful

Beautiful!

So, are you saying mods should kick off split threads with a new post? Or make sure the first post of a split thread is from a forum regular? Or just lamenting your newfound celebrity on the UA forum?

canadiancow

To be honest, it took me a day (or more?) to notice this, because I never look at the stickies.

Even now, I barely noticed there had been more replies.

I feel like it would get more traction as a normal thread.

​​​​​​​
I'm saying if you're going to have a thread name like that, maybe make sure the "author" isn't me

Adam Smith

Fair enough. I was actually wondering the same thing, so maybe we'll try it that way...

​​​​​​​I'm going to make sure you're the "author" of all the new threads! Mwahahahaha!

canopus27

Great questions. And I'm with cow, I didn't even notice this thread while it was sticky. Which tells us all something interesting about the value of making a thread sticky ....

I think there are two big picture types of threads - or perhaps I will change that to say that there are two types of reasons that people come to FT.
1. To debate stuff
2. To learn (and lookup) (and research) stuff

The debates could & should be in annual threads, IMHO. My hunch is that those threads tend to be the ones that can grow super long.

Generally speaking, the learning (information sharing) posts would actually lose value if they became annual threads. Although the AC programs & rules do evolve over time, most of them last for more than a year - and so for someone looking for information about upgrades, or the best way to connect in YYZ, or the best seats on a 77L - it would be better to leave those sorts of topics in one thread (each), so that it's easier to search.

How to best manage that separation is, of course, the sixty-four thousand dollar question. I'm not suggesting that "no discussion is allowed" in the information threads - heck, there's lots to debate about which is the best seat on a 77L - but I wonder if we could nominate some threads to be primarily reference/information based, and others to be primarily discussion based?

IluvSQ

Please don't go for the easy-hanging fruit - don't rename the " something scary near Winnipeg" thread!!!
That has historical significance.

tcook052

It does tell us something and would expect the sentiment may be echoed by most members.

I've long felt less is more so favor a single dashboard-type master sticky with links to key threads over a forest of separate stickies on the first page but that's MHO and as the FT saying goes YMMV.

RangerNS

I'm not sure if I have answers, but to answer this question one must ask other questions.

Like "why are we here" and I suppose even (channeling my inner McLuhan) "are the people servants of the media, or the media in support of the people?".

Examples to clarify those questions: stackoverflow has a technology that I think supports a very focused question/response. Responses, by the nature of the technology, are what matter. Wikipedia, or github are similar to stackoverflow insofar as the discussion is incidental to the collective creation of an artifact

I'll grant (and also beg the question) that the likes of "xyz forum lounge threads" are useful to help with community as a free form off topic discussion, but even that implies that discussion is the basic unit of artifact we do here. The default view is of threads of conversation; is this an accident of what VB does, or a desired nature of what FT is? This may open the question of moving to something that isn't VB, or isn't FT. Or that FT embraces something that isn't VB as the main "output" (while continuing VB as the incidental conversation tool)

I think we have all been slapped down by a moderator deleting an amusing aside to a conversation... Without questioning any one decision, if our collective output was wiki pages (or .md files in a git repo) then the asides would be fine. Or is the desired output a curated stream of rambling consciousness with the wiki pages being asides and accidents?

I think those are more important questions, or a more useful focus, then the details of the swear:quality ratios expected.

Transpacificflyer

Menus/Meals: I agree that there is little point in continuing threads on menus that have been retired. The suggestion of keeping one thread 'current" so it reflects the current menus and another as an archive for reference is useful. I know AC is slow to refresh menus, or at least slower than other carriers like AF/KLM or even Delta, but it would be easier if the thread reflected current offerings. The older menus can go to a historical topic as they allow for reference.

Sales/ Special fares: Yes i know there is another section dedicated to sales,e.g. premium fare sales, but I would greatly appreciate a target easier to navigate that was only current and specific to AC. Perhaps this is unreasonable as it is so closely linked to to *A fares, but I look for AC fares first.

thank you

Jagboi

Based on the BA forum, perhaps copy the Forum Dashboard post there, and how it splits into many sub posts. It's the first port of call for any question about the airline or FF program. Something similar for AC would be a great resource.

Also, to keep things relevant and current, perhaps have annual threads for things that change or threads that become too large? Things like the annual changes to Aeroplan would be a perfect candidate. Again, I'm thinking of things like the wine and champagne thread or the EU261 thread on the BA forums, where things can change from year to year, so advice from 2009 isn't applicable any more.