Question 3: What would you like from Internet Brands (site owner)?
 

If you had the chance to sit down with Internet Brand leaders, what would you tell them they need to do to improve the FlyerTalk experience for members?

Greater transparency. A representative that has all the best qualities of UA Insider who can announce decisions and answer questions. Oh and I'd thank them for bringing Chat back!

I completely agree with CMK10 on greater transparency ^ but I also would like to see F/t become more mobile friendly.

As I said in my campaign statement, the iPhone app* is a dog (and a dog with fleas afaic) as the formatting is terrible, threads with phantom pages cause the app to crash, one cannot properly see announcements and one cannot vote in a poll (and from a TalkBoard member's standpoint, this is not acceptable!). We are becoming more and more "mobile" and in it's current iteration, the iPhone app** needs to be fixed and brought up to speed [and clicking over to the website/desktop version is a poor option].

*I am an iPhone user so I can only speak from that view point but if there are similar problems/issues with the android app, then they need to be fixed as well

**and why is there no true iPad app?

Internet Brands' Interaction with FT
 

Agree with CMK10 and goalie on transparency and the app. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the last time I went to the iPhone app to use FT! :(

I've met some of Internet Brands' employees in person and spoke with others on the phone. They're good people and I think the community would benefit in strengthening this relationship.

All the previous answers have been 100% right on!... Hard to offer more here than those who have already commented on such important aspects of FT.

Please, please, please upgrade the technology platform. At a minimum, we need a more robust search function.

Bruce

An improved mobile app. It's such a pain to check FT on my iPhone. I'd also like perhaps more involvement in improving the beginner experience. At the moment FT is very difficult for the person who stumbles on the site through google from word of mouth. Also the snark could be reduced. I'm sure there are lots of ways to improve this...

Timely responsiveness to the needs of members. Not just addressing the crises, but also developing solutions to long-standing issues such as the usability of the iPhone app and search functions as already mentioned.

Transparency in moderation, please:

• Make the moderator best practices document public so people can know when a mod is violating them.
  
• Make the discipline database public so we can know what gets folks suspended or reprimanded and why and ALSO so we can audit it to make sure it is accurate.
  
• Make mods subject to 360 reviews, including input from posters and the TalkBoard.

Also, put some money into a decent mobile app.

Oh, and stock options for TalkBoard members!!!

I agree with what's been said above. I would like to add this:

That moderators need to be policed as well. Maybe they can be voted on or rated. I know they have a tough job to do sometimes but they cant just make decisions from on high without having more debate or community input about it. I think we may even need some regular "Meet the mods and discuss anything" sessions in here!

Finally, if someone is an obvious long-time contributing member with something valuable and continuously useful to add and share with others in FT, maybe something could be in it for that person. After all, it may be in part because of them and more like them that IB is where it is now.

;)MM

Interestingly, as a moderator myself, I often seek community input before making decisions. I even go so far as to conducting polls to see which approach seems to be preferred. On the Marriott board, I set up several polls about (1) renaming the board, which was done, and (2) trying to develop a hybrid approach that would lie in the happy medium between hotel-specific threads only and city-wide consolidated threads. In the end, we did agree on a hybrid approach, which I documented and published in a sticky thread. All moderators are not -- and hopefully none of them are -- heavy-handed dictators.

Bruce

Do you shoot a PM to posters when you delete their post, telling them why?

Is that a Moderator Best Practice? (please dont answer that if it will get you in trouble)?

Man, I wish mods were required to do that!

Oh, I just thought of one more thing I would ask for: no suspensions for life for other than spammers. Doing that to real people is dumb.

I delete too many posts to write a note about each one. In nearly every case, I have written to frequent offenders and told them that I will be deleting posts that meet certain criteria. Then I do exactly that.

I can recall banning for life only one person who was not a spammer. That person had some strange vendetta against Marriott and multiply posted weird diatribes in inappropriate places. Warnings were ignored. Finally, I had no choice but to ban him.

Bruce

I'm not so sure about the stock options happening ;) but yes to ransparency and to bullet points 1 & 2 along with a decent mobile app (as noted above by myself and others) but could you clarify bullet point #3 and the "360 reviews" :confused:

I like your approach ^ and where I cannot speak from a moderator's point of view, I would also like to think that none of the moderators are "heavy handed dictators" but I will say that each moderator has their own "style of moderation" and leave it at that

Moderators, being human, are not going to react exactly the same way to similar situations. But we do meet to discuss common problems and strive for reasonable consistency. Bad moderators have been replaced, as you would expect.

Bruce