Announcement: a subforum for "manufactured spending" will be added
 

Ways to earn miles has dramatically shifted in the last few years, and we want FlyerTalk to stay abreast of those changes. Rather than flying, many are earning their miles thru "churn that credit card!" It's corollary is "how do I create manufactured spend in order to meet that minimum spend/create miles".

Last year, the "Other Credit Card" forum was retitled and repurposed as "Credit Cards". It had been created some 10 years earlier to discuss credit card points programs such as Thank you points. It was nearly defunct in this role, and languished with a few posts and a lot of cobwebs. It is now a robust forum where folks can seek advice as to what credit cards to amass for their points earning opportunities. Many of the threads seeking specific advice on credit cards have been moved over from MilesBuzz!

Manufactured spend has become a major topic. There are those who are doing major miles earning with Amazon Payments, BlueBird payments, etc. These threads tend to be repetitive, dense and US-centric. I am creating a subforum called "Manufactured Spending" under MilesBuzz! This will make it easy for folks to either participate in the threads or ignore them, as they like.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/manuf...-spending-719/

Carol
Community Director

Carol, why do we want to draw attention with title like this??? We have cretid cards forum - just move those discussions there or create a sub forum in that space. Having this title showing up as one of the first things on flyertalk is both an insult to frequent flying and a certain way to kill loopholes.
With all due respect this is not thought through well enough.

As I said in the private TB forum:

Churning and manufactured spend is clearly the fad of the day, and it's a good idea to segregate it out into its own subforum.

Thank you Carol. Anything to get them off the first page of Miles Buzz. I still think they belong with Credit Cards, but it's certainly better than leaving them where they are.

Seems like a good idea.

Why not go one step further and put all credit card offers in their own forum? Would sure make MilesBuzz easier to read!

So, if we're breaking out the CC spend-related threads to a sub-forum (which is a good idea IMHO), how about the other off-topic area that clutters MilesBuzz...

There are a lot of newbie questions & general requests for help posted there...help a newbie pick a FFP, what miles to use for my honeymoon, how do I get started, which airline for XXX destination, which is the best hotel program, etc, etc, etc. None of which seem to have anything to do with "Discussion of the latest frequent flyer & hotel program buzz...only"

How about a forum/sub-forum specifically for newbies/getting started (or whatever you call it)? FWIW, MilePoint has something like this and seems to work.

Sure, one can click the triangle to report a thread that needs moved, but number one, it's not clear where many of these belong; number two, at certain times there are a lot of them. Occasionally some even are moved to MB from elsewhere on FT.

Or maybe I'm just too dense to understanding the buzz-worthiness of it all!

Great idea! ^

I like the decision. I don't care for the name. Not only does it call attention to these practices, it's not really accurate. Truly manufactured spend is only a subset of what is discussed. Much of it is shfting spending on non-bonus or no bonus things to bonus or higher bonus cards. Many of us, perhaps the majority, are uncomfortable with truly manufactured spend. Many of us are using techniques, for example, to pay taxes or mortgage with cards in a way to bring the fees to an acceptable cost per mile.

In short, I think the title of the subforum is both a lightening rod and underinclusive.

"Spending Optimization" or somesuch seems closer.

We welcome name suggestions. I agree that the current one is awkward.

The current name may stand some improvement....I will throw out these name suggestions:

MilesBuzz: Credit Cards
Milesbuzz! Credit Card Discussion
Milesbuzz! Credit Card Spend Discussion
Credit Card MilesBuzz!
Credit CardBuzz!
Credit Card SpendingBuzz!

I could go on....

As I said in the private TB forum:

It is what it is: manufactured spending.

The descriptor is too long to be a forum name: 'creative ways to achieve spending thresholds to get mile and point bonuses on point and miles credit cards'

I like "Boosting Credit Card Spend"

"manufactured spend" has a seemingly improper connotation to it.

But the descriptor is also only half the issue. People don't just want to increase to meet initial spend requirements for bonuses, they want to think of ways to increase overall CC spend just for the plain vanilla miles. E.g., the Mint. (FWIW, I never saw it as worth my while to lug dollar coins over to my bank on a regular basis, but those people were not doing it just to meet intro bonus threshholds.)

I accept this may be a semantic discussion about the breadth of the word manufactured and we may just have different ideas about what manufactured spending is, but I don't think most of what gets discussed now really is about truly manufactured spend. In a thread in the new forum I am participating in, we have come up with three terms, each of which are different things: time-shifting, bonus shifting, and manufactured spending. The techniques are similar, but the truth is the true manufactured spending discussion doesn't happen much in the board formerly known as milesbuzz, because these techniques are more heavily kept under wraps. One product that can facilitate true manufactured spend has been heavily edited to cover the tracks. Anyway, I do think the word is pejorative to some (many?) and might suggest FT is teaching people to cheat and defraud instead of how to be saavy and creative.

Only the unusually large credit card offers will appear on the MB forum. After the offer expires or cools down it will then be moved to the CCP forum or the appropriate forum. Basic card offers & questions will go in the CCP forums.