"News" button on posts: purpose, issues, discussion
 

I just noticed the "News" button with a thumbs-up symbol. The tooltip/hover-over-text says "Breaking News" -- what is this for, how does it differ from Threa d Tools -> Suggest Thread for TalkMail and why does it need to appear on every single post in a thread instead of being similarly in the Thread Tools menu?

These are two separate functions:

Suggesting a thread for TalkMail suggests it for the periodic member newsletter.

Suggesting a post - sometimes a post within a thread breaks interesting formation about a frequent flyer program change, aircraft purchase, property addition or deletion, etc. - and might be of interest to those who check FlyerTalk's front page and news stories. These change daily, or more frequently.

Announcment upcoming...

Fair enough, but on a percentage basis, I feel like having the News button on every single FT post is overkill. And it clutters up the UI.

Maybe it could be moved over to the left next to the "online" status and "report" button.

Also, out of curiosity was this feature one of the things called out in the readership survey as something people were asking for?

P.S. someone told me the thumbs-up News button has been there a long time. I swear I've never noticed it before :o :eek:

Do you guys specialize in tripping over your own feet? Why would you put something live before you even do an announcement about it? Seriously. I shake my head.

And please make it something more important than new post editor.

It still boggles my mind that you want input on a mobile app but have done very little to promote asking for input. No sitewide announcement for something that important.

Yes, it has been there for some time.

Agree it's overkill to have on every post and am also curious what drove it. At least place it in a lesser-used space or something.

Nope, just started showing up for me today, 100% positive of that - and I'm posting on here pretty much every day. In fact I first read this thread last night and couldn't figure out what in the heck the OP was talking about as I couldn't see any such button. Then this morning it showed up for me.

Ah, so I'm not imagining it! :D

A possible explanation just occurred to me: I wonder if a recent FT site update changed the HTML attributes (name, id, etc.) of that button, whereby it was being filtered out before, but no longer is.

That would explain why some people have always seen it, and others have only noticed it recently.

Although, that doesn't explain why 84fiero and I noticed it on different days. Unless it's an update to the filtering and we installed that update on different days.

I find the thumbs up icon unintuitive. It should mean "Like", not "News" (which should maybe get a Star or a Paper).

Quite.

We will work on the icon.

Moderators have had this for maybe a year. Everyone else with the proper FT credentials (not newbs) has it now.

For clarification purposes, the TalkMail newsletter is typically released twice per month — once during the middle of the month; and once at the end of a month. It is meant to highlight topics on FlyerTalk which are not extremely time-sensitive.

I find it ironic/disgusting that IB continues to implement things that aren't of importance to FTers & does sitewide announcements re: them, yet things that are important IB refuses to do sitewide announcements such as mobile app.

Oh come now. Disgusting?

We have business initiatives, we have community initiatives, we have regular maintenance tasks and upkeep... there are all sorts of things that cause priorities to lay where they lay, including the other websites in the portfolio that contains FlyerTalk, and the relative ease of accomplishing each task. While FlyerTalk is and always has been #1 for us, every desire of every member cannot be catered to as they wish. We welcome feedback and even solicit it. What happens after that is a matter largely of the schedule we are able to develop under. Just because the news on the home page is not important to some members, does not make it unimportant to others, or to the health of the site.

My daily presence in the forums should indicate how strongly we feel about this place, and how dedicated we are to making it better. We can't snap our fingers and get everything done at once, and some issues are far, far harder to work out than others.

Let's all keep our cool and be realistic, shall we?

A little perspective, perhaps: FlyerTalk is a biggish fish in a very large pond with 94 other fish (95 websites in seven categories). Changes are going to have to add value to more sites than just a single one, I suspect.

To flesh out Jose's sentiment a bit more, the "core" VBulletin development of things like the mobile skin affects 20 other travel forums directly, and is in turn affected by more than 500 forums across all of IB. We can't make changes lightly, nor can we do ones like this quickly, since there is so much riding on them in terms of community and in terms of development resources.

We all wish we could move faster and better hone in on the issues of major importance to groups of members. But we do our best and stay dedicated to the big picture of improving FlyerTalk along with all the other forums (though, again, FT is the primary mover of these things).

Agree with moving it - it's a control I'd rarely use but its current location gets in the way of those I often use.