kokonutz

All I seek is some sort of clarity around what actually belongs in the Travel News forum...if anything.

obscure2k

IMHO, a reasonable request.

Canarsie

To whom are you asking to provide that clarity? Members of TalkBoard? Moderators? Community director? Fellow FlyerTalk members? The WikiPost found at the top of this discussion?

kokonutz

To be perfectly honest I think I already know the answer: the remit is redundant to either travel buzz or the rest of FlyerTalk.

But there are people who seem to genuinely believe that the forum serves a need not met elsewhere on this wonderful web site.

So it is they from them whom I seek clarity.

CMK10

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [Travel News], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.
- Potter Stewart

tom911

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/talkb...ng-policy.html

intuition

While I too find the persistent critiquing annoying and deterring, I do see the point kokonutz is trying to make by referring to my latest post in Travel News.

I'd just like to explain my line of thinking before (and after) posting said news link in TN, in hope that sheds some light.

I read a news article which in my mind reported the first known major issue of the A359, where MSN15 suffers from lost cabin pressure in flight and returns to base.
To me such news is 'general travel news not associated with any individual program', and I believed other FT'ers would like to read such news in that mindset. I had no intention of debating the incident, the airline, the region or the plane model, and thus thought Travel News to be the perfect spot. It would catch the eye of other members with similar interest in reading news article from all around the world, without spurring much debate.


Admittedly the incident in the news article concerned one specific airline and happened in one specific location. But, any aircraft incident will by nature be related to one airline and will by nature happen in one location and that is not enough in my mind to claim they are primarily about that airline/location.

That was my rationale behind posting that specific link to TN.



As for posting to TN in general; There have been a lot of talk of redundancy but in my mind that isn't necessarily a problem. I can easily see a situation where some topic is being heavily discussed in an airline fora while at the same time that travel news is posted (and possibly discussed) in the Travel News section with a quite different angle. In my mind, that is not cross posting and not redundant.

And in fact, that is exactly what is described in #3 of the posting policy linked by tom911 above. If threads are duplicates, then sure some pruning is needed, but if they are taking different paths, then by all means let them grow.

kokonutz

Those decade-old rules have been modified several times since they were set.

In attempting to answer my own question this morning (Canarsie's question motivated me to find the answers I seek myself) I found the latest Travel News guidelines drafted, I believe, about a week ago in response to this thread:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...ding-room.html

(bolds and italics are the author's)

Me, I love guidelines. That's why I insisted the TB operate by a set of them and took the lead in drafting the TalkBoard Guidelies. So let's dig into these Travel News guidelines in a quest to answer my question: what actually belongs in the Travel News forum...if anything.

The simple guideline for inclusion is:

- A general news article that relates to travel in some way.


However, these guidelines provide most of their guidance by exception, ie, what CAN'T be posted in the forum that otherwise meets the simple guideline for inclusion:

- A thread that talks about the content or subject of the news article is not allowed. The thread must talk about the article itself.

- A thread without a link to a published article is not allowed.

- A thread related to one airline (or hotel chain, or car company, etc.) is not allowed and should be posted in the appropriate airline/hotel/car or destination forum.

- A thread primarily about one locale is not allowed and should be posted in the appropriate airline/hotel/car or destination forum.


Thing is, FlyerTalk pretty much has a forum for anything travel related. Every single airline in the world has a forum home. Same with hotels and cars. Every destination in the world as its own forum. Our special interest travel forums cover an incredible breadth of general travel issues. So after taking all of those topics away, the remit of Travel News ends up being incredibly narrow.

The only topics for articles I can think of would be those about commercial airframes and propulsion systems as well as articles about how current events (weather, war, disease, etc) are affecting travel but even then only if that effect is broader than regionally since every region in the world has its own forum. And both of those topics get a lot of coverage in TravelBuzz anyway.

But more to the point, does anyone really only want to talk about a news article itself? Aren't we here to talk about the issues of travel (ie, the content of travel articles) rather than the news articles themselves.

It's almost like a nearly impossible game to try to identify a news article that actually belongs in Travel News. As a result few articles get posted. And many of those get locked and moved because the game is so darn hard. And that makes the forum low velocity. So low that it has relatively few visitors, so even when someone rolls a snake-eyes and finds an article that fits the narrow remit, only a fraction of FlyerTalkers see it compared to if it had been posted in TravelBuzz.

It's a hard, hard game!

Perhaps if the article was about a trend of A359s used by different airlines having mechanical issues (as the 787 had) it would have fit the incredibly narrow remit of Travel News as described in the current guidelines. So long as the article itself was worth discussing. @:-)


I suspect Travel News made a lot more sense before FT had a forum for any and everything travel related. But now it does and Travel News is anachronistically out of step with how FlyerTalk is currently organized, making it redundant.

Prospero

Koko, i think you’ve nailed it - your point about inclusion versus exclusion is very interesting and actually captures what makes a forum intuitive and it’s purpose understandable to all.

To take your point to the extreme, TN really could use a disclaimer below its tag line along the lines of…
Joking aside, I think you are on to something and defining forums relating to what they include is the general practice on FT. It kinda works, and magnificently so.

nerd

Well, who makes decisions like the recent "Travel News is for meta-discussion about an article about a topic, but not for discussing the actual travel-related topic itself" ?

kokonutz

Poster Fredd made a comment in the TN thread pointing to this thread that makes an interesting point:

Fredd views Travel News as a one-spot aggregator of all travel-related news. And so it once was. Of course, we know from the current guidelines that it is not that today; it is a place where only general travel related articles not pertaining to any topic covered by any other forum on FT are meant to be posted.

But what if it was?

What if posters were specifically encouraged to post any and all travel related news articles into that forum, then the moderators of that forum were specifically tasked with locking them and moving them to the more appropriate forum (including Travel Buzz for the narrow, narrow category of travel articles that are currently appropriate for TN's current remit) on FlyerTalk with the locked forwarding thread left in TN .

Pros:

• There would be some actual utility to the forum as it would return to its original remit of being a news aggrigator.

Cons:

• It would take a lot of constant work by mods to constantly lock and refer every thread posted there.
  
• Since FT is now organized around provider and topic-related forums that's where people post news articles today and presumably most people would continue to do so. So mods would have to be diligent to check to see if a thread about the topic of the news article already exists in the subject appropriate forum to avoid creating duplicate threads there.

Bottom line (as points and miles bloggers always say):

It might not improve the velocity of the forum and would require a great deal more work by moderators.

But that set-up might (MIGHT!) be better than the confusing, anachronistic and redundant status quo.


(as the P&M bloggers ALSO always say) What do YOU think?! Should TN keep its current narrow, narrow remit? Or should we at least try to turn it into a proper news aggregator? Or should it be eliminated/merged with Travel Buzz? Give us your opinion in the boxes below!

intuition

I think many would want that. As I read it, this is the way that people has described their utility of TN in this thread too.


It would, but this work is already done today, isn't it?

If number of threads in TN significantly rose, the workload would increase, yes.
However, as said before, if you view TN as the aggregator, there is not an absolute need for locking threads. If a discussion occurs in TN and it is taking its own path (for instance on a general level), it could be viewed as a separate subject and be let alone. If the thread is duplicated and/or linked from TN, then I assume those in TN would know the difference and where to discuss on what level.
Maybe it will take even more hard work and/or be more confusing and/or I'm naive, I just wanted to suggest locking needn't be necessary.






Fixed that for you!

Solfor

It doesn't seem like there is any real reason to keep Travel News open. The scope of Travel Buzz encompasses Travel News. If the intent of FT in general is both to provide information and generate discussion, it seems obvious that news articles attract more eyeballs and discussion in Travel Buzz, given the much lower level of activity in Travel News.

teddybear99

Weighing in with two simple questions:

How much more does it cost to keep the forum open?

How much time is "wasted" in moderating it?

If the moderator is one of the people fighting to keep it open, it must not take too much of their time, and if the costs associated (bandwith, servers, legality of posts, etc) with keeping it open are nothing, then it should be left alone.

My $.02

Prospero

It probably costs nothing in monetary terms but forums filled with redirects do suffer from fragmentation causing issues with the search engine. For example, if you search within Travel News for “SeaPort”, the results exclude http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/other...on-thread.html, posted last week in TN.

There are additional costs in terms of user experience which kokonutz described in his post above (#563). I’d go further and argue that any forum that requires such a disproportionate amount of housekeeping is symptomatic of fundamental underlying problems - so easily fixed if TB has the will to address it.