As our live chats have become more and more popular, some of you undoubtedly have experienced frustration when it comes to getting your questions posted. In the past year I've served as a moderator on several of these chats, and thought you might be interested in learning, from my perspective, how you can improve your chances of getting your question submitted to the guest.

Tried and true tactics (in no particular order):

1. Pre-submit your questions. This may be the single best way to improve the odds of your question being asked. We generally don't get as many pre-submitted questions as you might guess, and we always use pre-submitted questions during a chat. If 20 questions are submitted, and we use 10 of those, your odds are obviously pretty good.

2. Avoid inflating the question by adding unnecessary and superfluos verbage (i.e., be concise ). As moderators, we are rapidly scanning hundreds of questions. What exactly are we looking for? Questions that: a) are not offensive, b) have not already been asked (believe me, that's not as easy to guard against as it sounds) and c) are topical (in other words, we try to stay away from posting questions that focus on the business operation of the airline rather than the frequent flyer program).

Beyond that, we are only moderately concerned with the subject and tone of the question. Of course, if there is a hot topic of the day we will be sure to post a question that addresses it, but we basically feel that every question, as long as it meets the above standards, is valid and deserves to be asked.

So, back to my original point, if your question is posed in the form of a novella and the next question in the scroll is nice and concise, the short question will often get the nod. Truth be told, it's just faster to scan the short questions to see if they meet the posting standards than it is to read through the long ones. That's not to say that you should never submit a longer question, just that your odds of getting a more concise question posted are probably better.

3. Submit questions during the second half of the chat. Usually, we receive a torrent of questions when the chat begins, then as the chat wears on the questions turn to a stream and finally a trickle near the end of our allotted time. To some extent, we as moderators can scroll back up and select questions that were asked previously, but the technology of the application doesn't support this very well, so we prefer to select questions that are currently displayed in the scroll window. Also, as the scroll continues we lose access to questions at some point (I believe this works the same way from your perspective), so by the time we reach the latter half of the chat it becomes impossible to retrieve a question that was asked near the beginning.

So, if you submit your questions in the latter half of the chat, when fewer questions are being submitted as a whole, we're more likely to see and select your question.

4. Refrain from addressing the moderator along with your question. This sort of ties in with tactic #2. I see a lot of posts along the lines of, "Moderator, please post this question as I'm sure many want to know the answer: (enter question here)?" While the question that follows this type of intro is often quite good, I won't post the question because it's addressed to the moderator rather than the guest. I certainly don't want to discourage anyone from communicating with the moderators - just be sure to keep it separate from the question.

5. Clearly identify follow-up questions as such. In the past couple of chats, a couple of you have preceded your question with a statement that reads something like, "A follow-up to the question about (enter subject here):" Good tactic. I'm sure that follow-up questions sometimes do not get posted simply because they contain similar phraseology to a the question that is being followed-up and, upon quick glance, it is difficult to discern whether the question is a follow-up or a general repeat of a previously asked question (which, as you now know, is something we try to avoid). Clearly identified follow-up questions are easier to scan quickly and, therefore, are better positioned in the selection process.

Of course, you could employ all of these tactics and still not see your question posted live during the next chat event. We get so many questions during a live chat that there is just no way we can pose them all to the guest. But these guidelines will definitely improve your chances.

If all else fails, I've proposed to Randy that he allow us to accept bribes. If that gets approved, believe me, I'll be the first to let you all know

Hope this helps.

[This message has been edited by Mikel at WebFlyer (edited 02-08-2002).]

Thanks for the helpful hints.

Would it be possible to ask followup questions as a matter of policy. So if someone asks a question (especially if its a hot topic in FT) - allow the person, if present, to present a followup question. This would also make it a little more "live".

How about a bribe of miles/upgrades?