Re-opening discussion on "Travel Buzz"
 

The suspension of one poster who only started threads simply to generate debate seemed to restore sanity at "Travel Buzz."

But now another(?) newbie is back exhibiting the same M.O. and others are joining in, some with good intent, some clearly out of frustration.

So I have a different suggestion: Let's add a new forum entitled "Travel Surveys" for people to post questions where the poster clearly has no purpose other than just generating a lot of replies, and no value judgements are applied. Then this type of thread can be removed from Travel Buzz.

That way, moderators would have a place to move these threads that doesn't require the initiator to be Omni-enabled and Travel Buzz can go back to its original intent.

I'm not sure why "starting threads to generate debate" warrants a suspension (isn't that kind of the purpose of TravelBuzz?), but I don't see the need for another forum for that. Otherwise, TravelBuzz might mostly be "How do a get from A to B cheap" , "Babies in First Class?" and tipping threads.

I suspect it was his signature line. It linked to a porn type website. I reported it.

Travel Buzz has become almost unreadable because of these one or two posters who have made it their mission in life to start inane survey type questions under multiple ids.

What should warrant a suspension is the fact that the poster in question has reregistered after having a prior handle suspended, which (as far as I'm aware) is still a TOS violation.

Mike

^

What to one is an "inane survey" is to others a reasonable discussion. It's TravelBuzz. Travel topics not related to miles or points. How do these posts not fit this category?

I agree with this completely.

As for the person who was suspended, sometimes the percieved reason for suspension isn't always the real reason for suspension.

To me, TravelBuzz is primarily a place for postings that either don't fit well into just one forum or to ask for general travel-related info that the user doesn't know the answer to. It isn't "OMNI that just happens to have a travel connection."

But the occasional unusual survey question can add flavor, so for me, a large portion of the problem is that the current flock of questions are (a) stupid and (b) way, way too frequent.

Is someone really adding value to FT if all they do is start threads like this and never help anyone else by otherwise contributing?

I can ignore one or two, but it's hard when the whole first page of the forum is dominated by them. These stupid questions have, for me, destroyed the value of what once was one of the most interesting forums in FT. I know I am not the only one.

Moderation is beyond the scope of the TalkBoard.

If anyone is interested in changing the purpose of Travel Buzz, or creating a new forum, please start a new thread and keep moderation out of the discussion.

I've started such a thread:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showt...73#post6786573

Thank you