tom911

You need to start your own frequent flyer site, or, if you want to take baby steps, start with a blog with lots of credit card offers. That should cheer you up as the dollars roll in. ^

One thing I like about Milepoint is that new posters aren't sent to the dungeon. FT has a reputation of sending new members off to search 1000 post megathreads for the info they're looking for and those threads just continue to grow across all the forums of FT. I've complained about them before and there has been movement in one airline forum I frequent, but in other airline and hotel forums they just seem to keep on merging and growing bigger every day. I was looking at a hotel thread just this week that goes back 10 full years--is anyone really going to make a decision about staying at a property based on info posted 10 years ago? I think that hurts FT and after a certain point the old material needs to be archived and taken out of the active thread.

I just don't find a lot of value when it's going to take hours to read through a 1,000 post thread in search of something, particularly if you're new to flying or hotels and need some basic information to make decisions about which direction to go. We all know if can be a challenge to come up with the perfect search terms to find something here.

Sadly, megathreads is another moderation issue and not much a member can do about them, let alone the Talk Board, and they will continue to be a challenge for members looking for current information.

tom911

As someone else mentioned, there is something close called "watched threads". Basically, anytime you post you are subscribed to the thread automatically, and when you check the site you'll have a notification at the top right of the screen if there is any activity in those threads. Sort of the equivalent of subscribing to an FT thread without having to go to a menu to subscribe. I rather like that feature as it is time saving and it will tell you "who" is responding to your post, and then you can click through and read the response if you want.

Another feature I like is photo insertion. With FT you insert a link and have to physically create and post the thread to see what your photo looks like. With Milepoint, it appears in the thread before you post it, so you can see what it looks like before it appears on-line. In the case of some folks who like to post photos that extend out 2-3 screens, they would notice that right away here, where with FT you would not notice it until after you made your post. Just better ability to preview your photo on Milepoint and correct it or resize it to make it look better before posting.

LearningToFly

Fair enough, what about thumbs up and plus one and thanks-for-that-great-thread hère ?

tom911

I don't do Facebook, but isn't some of that similar to what you find there? I've never typed a "thanks for the great thread comment" that I can recall though I have used the thumbs up feature, particularly if I find the post informative on a particular topic or a photo of particular interest.

FT has a history of posters just inserting as their response and getting thousands of posts. I remember one heavy airline forum poster, now banned, who must have got half his posts here just posting emoticons in response to posts he didn't care for, and his post count was well over 10,000. Think I'd rather have a "thumbs up" than another smiley. Some FT posters can get a half dozen of those smilies in a single post.

kokonutz

The market seems a bit over-saturated to me.

Wiki posts are a wonderful solution to the 'too much data' and 'mega thread' issues. And anyone can start or contribute to them!

onthego15

There actually are quite a few people who find great value in Milepoint and who do not find the same in FlyerTalk. I can make this statement with clear authority because I spend lots of time on Milepoint and have read many thousands of posts there. I am NOT trying to say that Milepoint is better than FlyerTalk. That is totally a matter of opinion. It's a simple fact that each meets different needs for different people.
As Randy noted, there is no need to disparage one to boost the other. I find it far more useful to find value in both. They are rather different to me and I get different benefits from each. Personally I prefer Milepoint. Yet, I see value in both and I participate in both.

hobo13

I've noticed that the only time I read MP is when I can't sleep.... so yes, about once every 3-4 months.

Tiki

I think both have their good and bad points. Milepoint has a better interface and I like the avatars but what I don't like are the status points. I was actively posting there for awhile, then it got ridiculous with people begging for "likes" or posting anything just to increase their status. What I don't like about FT are the mega-threads. These programs change so often what was relevant a year ago probably isn't relevant this year. At least some forums start new threads each year like the IHG forum.

I also don't like when airlines are merged but they keep separate active forums on the old programs. A good example is old United, Continental and the current merged program. I get that some people are unhappy with the merger but it's a reality and they have to deal with what it is, not what it was. I wish they would relegate the old forums to historical archives and make them read-only and have everyone post new topics in the current United forum.

tom911

I wish they were all just a year old. If you look at the front page of the AA forum right now, we have three threads, each with over 1,000 posts, going back to 2008, 2009 and 2010. There's one on the front page of Hyatt that goes back to 2001 with over 1,000 posts.

hobo13

I expect that within 2 years, everything that is posted to the United forum will be consolidated into 1 of 5 mega-threads.

oliver2002

A quick gentle reminder that if you have a problem about the structure of forums or particular comments about how situations are handled in that forum, you are free to alert your TB representative(s) in the TB forum for the former and the respective moderators for the latter. Please don't do it here.

Regards Oliver2002
Mod EM&PR forum

oliver2002

The may stats are out: https://siteanalytics.compete.com/mi...c=uv&months=12

FlyFasterFlyFarther

Wow, thanks for posting that oliver2002 there's some fascinating stuff on that website! It confirms just how much bigger Flyertalk is than Milepoint. But it also really looks like Flyertalk is in serious decline.

https://siteanalytics.compete.com/fl...c=uv&months=12

What's going on here?

Raffles

It is almost certainly down to Google ranking blogs ahead of FT. Not helped, of course, by FT threads being very SEO unfriendly. Newbies are no longer offsetting natural attrition.

How did YOU find FT? Probably via Google on a search. Do the same search today and you would get a load of blogs entries coming up instead.

These people DO eventually discover FT, of course, but I think a lot of people now decide not to invest the time to deep-dive it because they are already reading a blog and that seems to give them what they need.

tom911

A drop of 148,000 unique visitors in the last 12 months (343K to 195K, a 43% drop). Will be interesting to see what the numbers look like the next 12 months. Do these numbers impact ad revenue?

Milepoint went from 40K to 28K in the same period, about a 30% drop.

I wouldn't expect Milepoint to have the volume of FT as Milepoint has not been around for 15 years.