That's a resonable point, but I'm not sure this would actually make any difference. We'd still counsel people to do a search first, and some portion will still ignore it. I'd love to hear ideas to correct that problem, becuase it is a poster laziness issue. But, like I said, I would imagine it happens just as often before as after AFT.

I'd like to reiterate my support of this forum.

I agree as well.
But there are some complexities that have to be considered.
I find the dialogue here very interesting and hope that we get some additional feedback from other FT members.

While not necessarily opposed to the idea, I would think that time spent by more knowledgeable FTers in this forum would lead to lesser availability of those same posters in specific forums where program/topic-specific questions were being properly asked.

Reward those who query to the least? :-:

I think this forum could indeed be a worthwhile addition to FT; some explicit benchmarks by which to measure its sucess would be helpful to formulate

Speaking for myself, in the FlyerTalk forums which I currently moderate, I already do merge duplicate threads together — and will more than happy to do so if the Ask FlyerTalk forum is created and a thread is eventually moved to one of those forums that already has an existing thread on a similar topic.

This way, when someone does a search on a particular topic, there are fewer threads that will appear as a result, hopefully assisting the FlyerTalk member in finding the sought-after information faster and easier.