Just a friendly reminder from your moderator team to abide by the FlyerTalk terms & conditions as well as the overall spirit of the community when posting in this forum. We are striving to maintain a friendly environment that welcomes the free exchange of ideas, perspectives and experiences through constructive dialog. Without personal, disruptive, controversial, extreme or off topic comments. Please take a moment to embrace this concept before you post a new comment, reply or thread and please use the Report Bad Post functionality of the forum should you feel someone is out of line.

And on a related note, United Continental Holdings is here to stay. The merger has been approved and executed. It is time for everyone to accept those facts, stop arguing about the past and start focusing on the future.

Thank you in advance for your assistance in making FT a fun place to hang out!

Sounds great. Have not seen anything on the "504" forum. Has there been any discussion to enhance civility there as well?
^


Can we also expect that the T's and C's for repetitive posts and post count padding will be monitored?
http://www.flyertalk.com/help/rules.php#q92
http://www.flyertalk.com/help/rules.php#q94

As mentioned, feel free to utilize the Report Bad Post (RBP) button should you feel something is a violation. Remember, as volunteers, the mods may not be able to review each and every post.

I am 150 percent behind the United and Continental merger as these are some of my favorite airlines(:

Some of us aren't, as there are some aspects of UA like *Net blocking which we hope do not survive the merger but are big concerns. Nonetheless, I am cautiously optimistic, a position I did not take on the DL takeover of NW, which has been a disaster from a ff standpoint.

Hoping for a reversal would be just a waste of time as that is not going to happen. The best we can do is urge that the positive aspects of both airlines are what go forward into the new airline and that the merger is not used as an opportunity to hose ff members as it was in DL/NW and AF/KL.

I am myself a refugee from the DL takeover of NW, and do not care to have to go through the same period of wondering what will happen all over again, but if they screw it up too bad, there is always AA.

In discussions we need to highlight CO's good practices that we expect the new airline to keep and UA's bad practices like *Net blocking that we hope they do not. We do not need to pretend that CO from this point can remain a seperate airline as the process had moved way too far for that.

So much for balance. What are some of the good practices from CO you would like to see kept? Also, is there anything good from UA you'd like them to keep? Anything from CO you'd like to see eliminated?

Civility is over-rated.

SDC and standby fees for non-Plats
Poor award availability for *A partners online
Adoption of ps flights in Newark.

Having been through the wars in the NW/DL forum merger and been disgusted by it, I would like the mods to explicitly warn against certain inflammatory terms. They might not sound inflammatory taken out of context, but trust me, they quickly turned into hot-buttons.

Kool-Aid (and especially here, COol-Aid)

Loyalist

Apologist

There are more, but you get the idea. FTer A decides that FTer B is a "CO Loyalist" just because B doesn't agree that UA is evil.

FTer C calls FTer A a "CO apologist".

These terms polarize the forums. They become akin to political attack ads. In reality, FTer B might think that a lot of what UA has isn't as good as what CO has, and hopes NewUA uses a mix. But because FTer B isn't changing her/his signature to include links to anti-merger websites and doesn't condemn every single thing UA brings to the table, FTer B gets labeled as drinking the UA Kool-Aid.

Posters without a lot of enthusiasm for having arguments who don't follow every post by A, B, and C, may get unbalanced views of the participants and their POVs due to this labeling.

Trust me. I was one of the people who became FTer B over in the DL/NW wars, which really turned me off to FT entirely for a time.

I'd like to think we can discuss the pros and cons of each airline that are coming together, without having to pigeonhole each other into artificial political parties.

That seems to be going a bit overboard. Ever heard of something called free speech? That said, I expect this merger to be far less contentious but will almost certainly have some rough spots. Both airlines have their positives as well as negatives that will have to be worked through. DL turned out far more negative than even many skeptics imagined but I am keeping my fingers crossed that this one will not.

1) That does not apply here as the FT forums are not bound by the US constitution's ban of government controlling speech.

2) It is possible to exercise "free speech" without being a jerk and attacking people rather than their ideas. That is what we're talking about here.

I'm a big CO fan. That being said, I want to see UA's hard product, such as the true F class on 744, E+, and most importantly, ps flights from EWR as well!

I personally have had much better experiences with CO FA's than I have had with most other airlines. UA specifically has been one of my worst, so I'd like to see that attitude carried over.

In terms of rewards, mileage gains... I'm not familiar enough with either airline's practices to make an honest judgement. I'm a much more infrequent traveler who happens to be OP Gold because my flights are mostly TATL.

Agree 100%. ^

David

1. Channel 9.
2. Napkins folded in half under the coffee cup.
3. Rhapsody in Blue.

The terms that the poster wanted to ban were actually terms that DID refer to people's ideas.

Terms that are personal attacks that do not refer to their positions on issues, like calling someone a drunk, an a-hole, or stupid or the like, I quite agree with you. Personal attack terms are very inappropriate.

And while I would agree that the 1st amendment does not apply to a forum such as this one, the term free speech is much broader than that and is something we should strive for throughout our society as a fundamental American principle.