Once Upon A Time...
 

... this forum was filled with clever ideas on how to earn as many miles as possible and use them in the most efficient manner. That was really very helpful to most readers and even if you couldn't use a particular strategy, it made for interesting reading. Perhaps one of the best examples was Pudding Guy.

Now, most of the posts are from folks asking for advice or help either a) what airline should I use for my primary flying, or b) how can I get miles to go from XXX to YYY. Most of these threads are not very useful to most readers nor are they very interesting.

Sorry to be so negative, and I am not sure if anything could, or should, be done to change that.

It is just a personal statement of how boring I am finding this forum, which used to be, for me at least, one of the most interesting in FT. I know, if I am not interested, I can skip reading here, and I do much of the time, but it just makes me a little sad. Maybe it's just a function of the FF business.

Back then, there were few blogs, so most of it had to be here.

Now, every time I visit FT (at least on weekdays), there's several new blogs rotating on the front (and more listed below), many of which seem to cover much of the territory once only found here.

Another factor is that the stragecies that are possible have gotten fewer and at the same time much more complicated. The US coins strategy seemed complicated when it was around in comparison to some that came before, but that was nothing compared to the latest buzz of manufactured spending.

So with specialized and more complicated strategies, you need lots of threads and thus a separate per-strategy forum. And thus you can no longer count on just forum to sanely contain it all.

The other part, which did the last piece of "stripping" this forum, is that almost the only strategies of late were with credit cards, but there were forums already for that, and it was just "littering" this forum in a sense. So it moved. If that's what still excites you, move along with it.

+ 1, Fortunately I have been at this for over 10 years and have had many wonderful trips as well as several million miles in the bank. I think the thing that has changed the most is we have many more participants than we had 10 years ago, and the bloggers. This makes the trips more difficult to find and the strategies more short lived. T

All these moves to put threads in the "correct" forum are what made this forum, and the S.P.A.M. forum, boring. Now my reading is more scattered and less interesting overall.

Might want to check out the threads that were moved to the Talk Board forum:

WTH is this? A "how can I travel for free" forum?

What good is MilesBuzz! if .... [Legacy card threads moved to Credit Card Programs]

Please follow discussion in the threads linked above. Thank you.