Two issues have been repeatedly mentioned in this thread: TalkBoard and moderation.

Speaking as a former member of TalkBoard, I can confirm what Aristotle said: Nature abhors a vacuum. We established a member-elected governing board and gave it almost no authority. It can only recommend the establishment of new forums and establish rules which only apply to itself.

Hence, the TB members fill the vacuum by having silly fights about meaningless internal issues. FTers see this, find TB to be a joke, better FTers don't want to serve on it and not only are there fewer and fewer candidates each year but there are less people voting for TB.

At the same time, we have moderators who range from the truly great to the atrocious -- and most members know which are which. I would suggest putting TalkBoard in charge of moderation, allowing it to establish the rules under which moderators work, and giving it authority to fire mods and appoint new ones.

This would fill the vacuum I mentioned, attract better members of TB, and increase interest in the elections while also taking care that the poorer mods are no longer supervising the posting. (I don't believe that a member-elected board would have any interest in getting rid of the better mods.)

Delete OMNI, as it does nothing to achieve the stated goal, to "make this the best frequent flyer experience it can be". I argue it makes it worse.

(Yes, I know it will never happen as the real goal is to drive traffic and ad revenue)

...I would create a mechanism that recognized OPs who started engaging threads.

While FT shows post counts and join dates, I think FT would be even better if it showed an indication of how interesting the user was to the rest of the FT community. The easiest way to measure a user's interestingness would be to count the number of replies to threads started by that user. Perhaps there could be a badge for posters who started threads that generated 100 replies, another badge for posters who started 1000-reply threads, another badge for 10,000 reply threads, etc? (The count would only include replies that met a certain minimum word count, so that "+1" and "Concession Accepted" replies would not count towards the total.)

:D:D:D:D ^

I hate slogging through thousands of posts to get an answer....I wish the admins would keep a new question up for at least a few hours. of course, I may have a question and all I get is snarky responses like "theres a thread about that already", and I look through several hundred pages and cannot find the answer. But in general I think this is a great forum!!!

OMNI serves a certain purpose and does help build a community - not all of life is spent discussing very specifc on-topic issues, and OMNI allows for that. It sits behind a tab on the top bar, and everyone is free to ignore it. Yes, it gets silly, but part of life is just that - I think of it sort of as the Friday afternoon cocktail of FT.

Now, that having been said, "bad" OMNI really needs a review. I wander in there once in awhile when a subject line intrigues me, and I'm always sorry I did.

• Appoint a senior, paid, moderator to oversea all moderation actions and complaints who reports directly to the CD and is not considered part of the volunteer moderator corps.
• Rotate moderators through all the forums, just as the senior moderators are rotated in and out of that role
• Create a forum much like the old "Ask Randy Peterson" forum
• Get rid of the lounge threads. IMHO, they were created in the M&P fora when Omni was a single forum and people didn't want to see or deal with some of the nonsense there. Now there are 2- lite & PR and lite should go back to being FT's Living Room where all members go to shoot the breeze. Remove the access requirement and let everyone enter it. The community will be better for it. I would never have met some people had it not been for Omni because we frequented different fora.
• Review the purpose behind the Talk Board. When FT was young, it was a way discuss improvements to the community. Well, FT is pretty mature now, and they're bickering more than improving. Just look at how few people even bother to vote. It can become a popularity contest where all people from one forum (see the lounge threads) get together to vote in one of their own. How is that representative of the community?
• How about some more mega-Dos???

A lot has been posted about moderation in this thread - there are some very good ones and very bad ones. And it's easy to tell. If people felt differently you wouldn't have so many comments about it. When you encounter a bad one, well, there's really no place to complain, and the optics to everyone else are really bad. Mods are human too, and as such, have good days, bad days, biases, and preferences. That's why I suggest a paid super moderator as a stop gap and an offical place to complain. While you can appeal to the CD, well, she's got more important things to do than police the mod corps. And sometimes they need policing too.

I really enjoyed the old FT - the camaraderie and friendships that were made. That seems to have pretty much stopped, and for the life of me, the only things I can cite is the fracturing of the community into their own fora and not participating in other areas of FT. Heck, I saw a few posters say that the purpose of FT is for MSing (I kid you not). The demographics have changed and some of the old timers simply are tired of dealing with it and them.

Moderation is generally a problem on every forum, and definitely not specific to flyertalk (and the ones on here, at least of the ones I've seen on the forums I look at, aren't bad at all). There's a certain balance...yeah, you don't want a forum to degrade into a free-for-all, but some moderators figure that this is going to be as close as they're going to get to winning an election, so they're going to make the most of it.

I agree with the general sentiment here, but OP status seems like a pretty poor proxy for overall helpfulness/value to the community. Plenty of people add value not by starting threads, but rather by providing useful replies, maintaining wikis, etc. Others have suggested upthread the idea of liking or up/downvoting posts, which seems like a better metric.

There was a time when FlyerTalk was the product and participants were the customers.

Somewhere along the line that changed such that airlines are the customers and participants are the product.

Because of that I don't see any significant or meaningful changes arising from this effort.

I would implement Tapatalk as the choice of mobile experience. Great app for using other forums and a far nicer interface than the FT mobile site.

Design some new FT luggage tags that are a bit nicer than the current offering (which are too big for a hold-all cabin bag really).

Have a clean-up of profile features and the profile page - e.g. currently there is both a profile picture and an avatar, the 'mentions' and 'map' tabs on profiles don't seem to do anything, and who uses social groups? Also make search better - pick up keywords rather than phrases, and make it find older results e.g. you can only see the 1000 most recent threads when you look at someone's profile.

I've become friends with some people through posts in OMNI, and OMNI-Lite does build community, much like the Lounge threads in some forums.

I usually avoid bad OMNI because it does get so nasty and hateful.

I would do something about the moderators who will merge every thread if they can dig out a similar thread from 6 years earlier, and close threads if they don't like the topic being discussed.

Better search | Acronym overuse | Click bait stories
 

Searching can be very frustrating. One frequently gets way too many results or the message saying "too common term"

As we become long time readers we begin to understand the secret language (DYKWIA, TPAC, WFCBFC, ETC.) The glossary frequently doesn't have acronyms which leaves the great unwashed in limbo.

Many of the featured stories written by bloggers have provocative titles and lead you to content that is uninformed and sometimes even irrelevant to the title.

Standardize WIKIs. One airline forum may have excellent, up to date information on topics of interest while another has aged, hard to find information on similar topics. (See e.g. Delta vs. United)

Having said the above, I use Flyertalk as my primary source for travel information. It's not perfect, but it's worth the time to get to know it.

If I ran FlyerTalk...I would ask myself a question every single day:

"Why can't I get a job from Nolo instead?" :p