Great, but...
 

I have read the comments (on 3 pages as of this writing) AND kudos for the great work done. I chime in on most of the comments and agree that a great board has gotten even better in many respects...but

In one respect, an critical one, I believe the board has become worse.

The area that is worse is response. Because there are four sections, divided into XX-ZZ number of categories, it now seems nearly impossible to get a reply to a question.

For a member to stumble onto to a question on one of the "location (city, state, country continent)" areas that he or she can assist with is multiple times less likely that before. Even if the number of topics is the same, the diverse locations possible to post a topic makes it much less likely for it to get the same attention that it received when there was 80-85% less places for the topic to be posted.

The number of possible places to post also makes the decision of where to post a bit more complicated. This is likely to get better but, as before, will never get full compliance.

An additional area of concern. If I want to know something about a specific chain hotel in a city, places to dine and things to do. Do I post three or four topics in different places? Can I hope for someone who has traveled, to say Canberra, Australia to find them all?

This works in reverse too. I would like to help those traveling to areas that I have material experience. Seattle, San Diego, Hawaii, Los Angeles and some of Australia. I can help with Hyatts, dining, and activities. How many places do I need to visit in this new format to insure that I can help as many people as possible?

ranles, I agree 100%. You make very good points. It's not that the amount of information has changed dramatically, it's the number of places of where to look for that info which has changed dramatically!

i miss general travel talk. perhaps i will find the other forums soon.

Easy to find at:

http://www.flyertalk.com/travelfr.shtml


with much past material focused within:

http://www.flyertalk.com/travel/fttravel_fo rumcgi/forumdisplay.cgi?action=topics&forum=TravelBuzz!&n umber=11&DaysPrune=5&LastLogin=


[This message has been edited by doc (edited 07-12-2001).]

I agree Ranles. Too fragmented. Too ambitious a leap from what we had to what we have now.

I too have trouble navigating BUT I believe that it is simply time until I get my new bearings and feel for nFT. I too believe this will be the same for many out there.

With the growth of FT over the past year, much due to the media, there will soon be many more here to fill in the information you look for.

With the addition of Moderators any time now, forums should be able to stay more on topic I believe.

Dorian

agree 100% too many places

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Viele Grüße

Oliver

I agree as well.
I was not a very curious user of the "old format" Forum, but when the new one was introduced, I visited - and posted to - so many different places and threads, I can't remember which ones.
Maybe I'm just old and senile? http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

I think there are many new features that have greatly enhanced FT, but I agree that there is very much ground to cover. I guess time will tell if we all get accustomed to the new format or if we need to suggest that the old format be reconsidered.

Given the amount of simultaneous changes the board(s) underwent, it's probably best to view the current situation as a shakedown cruise. IMHO, there's too much real estate to cover, and with all the new boards, some (natural) confusion over where to post.

Just a guess, but I would think that most board traffic will end of gravitating to the Miles Forum, which may end up making it difficult to get answers to location-type questions, particularly on a timely basis.

In another thread, someone suggested the creation of a "My FlyerTalk" homepage, where users could have quick hyperlinks to their favorite forums (I would provide the URL link but I forgot where I saw it!). I think this would a popular navigational tool for new and old users alike and could solve many of the problems some of us are facing with the FT's new breadth (although I am not such a big proponent of the mile wide and an inch deep approach). From my very limited non-technical experience with writing specs for websites I think it can be done, although I apologize if this would be a programming headache...

For a proposed "My FlyerTalk v1.0", I would suggest the following core features:

-Most Active Threads in the "Four FlyerTalks"
-My Favorite Forums (United, MilesBuzz, Starwood, etc)
-My Favorite All-Time Threads (Who We Are 1-9, etc)
-Threads Where I've Posted Most Recently
-Threads Where "My Favorite FTers" Have Posted Recently
-Community Favorite Threads
-Event Calendar (Both FT Community and Randy's appearances, etc)

Optional Features
-FF Miles Program Manager (license from third party)
-Airfare Tracker
-Booking Engine (Orbitz, Expedia, or Travelocity would PAY for this access)

To whomever suggested this, it is an amazing idea!

I'm off to go find the original thread.

P.S.- doc, can you edit the link in your post up above so we don't have to scroll left-right?

[This message has been edited by chexfan (edited 07-12-2001).]

I like the old system with a variant on the new colours. These colours suck, but so did the old ones - pale gray and pale blue are the way to go. All that has happened with this new system is that the smilies look like a kid painted them on with a worn out marker pen. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/frown.gif I see NO other useful changes. Does anyone else?

And Doc's link above looks normal to me - suspect Chexfan is one of the brave 20% left using Netscape not Explorer? http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

I like the old system with a variant on the new colours. These colours suck, but so did the old ones - pale gray and pale blue are the way to go. All that has happened with this new system is that the smilies look like a kid painted them on with a worn out marker pen. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/frown.gif I see NO other useful changes. Does anyone else?

And Doc's link above looks normal to me - suspect Chexfan is one of the brave 20% left using Netscape not Explorer? http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

And things seem incredinly s--l--o--w now too. All days, at all times.

And things seem incredibly s--l--o--w now too. All days, at all times.

SkyMiler--I agree!
In fact today the American Airlines board was
not slow it was STOP.
I lurked around a lot of places I don't have
time normally to visit. They took forever to
load....

Much, much better this morning! Thanks! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

I, too, feel that the old general category
is splattered everywhere.

But, of course!

One of the additional problems is the lack of a search feature for all boards or forums. Bad enough if we have to do a search for 4 different "mini-boards" (Miles, Travel, Dining and Airports), but now there is no "all forums" selection to search on each of those 4 boards. So, if you are looking for particular information, you have to search each forum individually! While I recognize that this takes a lot of computing power, it has made the idea of searching for stuff incredibly difficult.

Djlawman

It's amazing...first people complain about too many people clogging up the boards, then people complain about the boards being too fragmented.

Must be different people.

I personally never minded a specific board/thread being a little bulgeous, because I like reading/responding to what's going on, and I thought people spanking other people over being "off-topic" is/was a little much for a volunteer forum like this.

Good morning everyone.

First, I'd like to say that even though I'm saddend by the feedback here, it's very good feedback and something that I feel will go a long way towards helping us serve you better...the saddness stems from the fact that we want to serve you as well as possible and it seems that there are more than a few of you who are not satisfied with the current direction we have chosen to take...for any and all inconvenience we apologize.

The second thing that I would like to mention, and this may go a long way towards allaying some of the regrets here, we do have plans ( in the "hopefully" not so distant future ) for a "My FlyerTalk" sort of area.

My FlyerTalk has been in the works for some small amount of time now and will hopefully become available soon. Please continue to be patient with us as this is something that we have to add ourselves as it is not part of the purchase of the UBB license itself...custom coding takes a wee bit more time, but in the end we feel that it'll be worth it.

Thank you for your time and patience in this matter.

------------------
Michael at WebFlyer
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>
2428 Hall Ave.
Grand Junction, Co. 81501
970.263.4201

There are always some who are resistant to change and/or progression.

Dorian

Michael -

Thanks for your post! Don't be sad, though: we run a small business, and believe me, praise is nice, but getting feedback about problems is CRUCIAL!

The new FT has many good features, but it is different, and I for one have found it so slow at times that I've just given up and logged off, which surely must be the last thing you want to happen.

I haven't posted about the problems before on the theory that I'd wait a while to see how it worked out, but the combination of slow and broad can get to be too much. It does seem to be improving slowly. One thing I notice is that the ad stuff loads first now. It used to be possible to stop the ads loading because it came at the end. That adds extra time to how long it takes for a page to come up. Maybe your advertisers insisted on the change?

Is it possible to add a Hop To the other areas (Dining, Travel, etc) on each forum, thus eliminating the extra step in going from one to another? That would help make the spread out feeling a little less.

I guess the interim fix is to add more places to my already overloaded toolbar.

But PLEASE do something about the smilies. It's not just that they look ucky: it's hard to tell expression from expression. And they're as bad on my 21" Viewsonic as on my laptop, or the ancient 15"er.

Of course the reward for all your hard work is - more hard work! Overall, Flyertalk is a wonderful thing, and we love you guys.

P.S. We use both Netscape (preferably) and Exploder, and get basically the same performance from FT on them. Really only 20%?

Michael:

Two issues:

(1) when hitting "refresh" it goes to the top level of the board instead of refreshing that page. Very annoying.

(2) can the smilies be restored to what they used to look like? They look bad!

In general, I think the changes are great.

Visually, I think the site looks great: very clean and professional.

The My Flyertalk is also a great idea...customizing presentation of the threads we each read most often!

The thing about the right number of threads is a ****ed if you do ****ed of you don't kind of thing.

agree that the new division is too fragmented. i tried to read different forum/division. but there is no way i am going back there again.

onw suggestion...to cross post (automatically), i.e. the first post person should decide where the thread belongs, and one thread, under a primary forum, could belong to multiple (2ndary/etc) forums.

this is very easy to do in terms of content managemnt. thread are store in the primary forum, and forum will search for the releavnt thread (2ndary) and pull them together. this can be done in batch (say, every other hour) in the server, so that one does not have to recalculate at the client side

i do not know if the software provider is capable of doing this, but it is very simple programming anf they should at least plan this for their next version