You're not alienated! The site functions the EXACT SAME WAY it did on Monday. All the content is still there. The UI is the same.

As for your second point, I agree and we're working with the team that developed the badge product to create more badges that can be tied to site accomplishments universally. The original product had a lot of badges for donations, military service, etc. A big hurdle is that FT doesn't use the supported Likes system (the one we tried in 2021, if you remember that).

Id recommend https://www.logmytrip.net/ for those with badging needs. That's how it's done.

The UI is not the same. The UX is not the same. There are people who are complaining about them changing.

it's well known displaying post counts affects user behavior on forums. Not usually a big deal but it is a thing. Many forums hide post counts as part of a less is more approach and to remove the ego side of it. Some forums even implement ways to rank a user's post quality over time and display that metric instead of the count. By displaying the count you are implying it means something. And it does. But what is it?

Remember the original twitter. Gloriusly simple. Now look at it.

Could you post a screenshot of how the badges on that look? I'm interested

a lot of the dev history is documented here on FT. Originally had separate flight and hotel stay loggers then combined it all.
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trav...-logger-6.html

Thier badges are achievements/awards. Auto generated based on data you log. I have not updated it in a while as i ceased frequent travel
https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...0c9f1b85bc.jpg
https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...a4d9480afc.jpg
https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...c7751240e3.jpg
https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...0038eb4b7e.jpg
https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...e5a4231aa4.jpg
https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...b46da38972.jpg

There are quite a few different apps that you can use to log your travel.
And there are logs generated by your activity on different vendors as well (e.g. BA records and shows all your countries and miles).
That's not really the same thing as badges on a general social media platform IMO.
As others have mentioned the ability to link to your detailed travel profile already exists on FT (if you wish to expose it to others) via your home page etc.
I think the FT badges are deliberately meant to be a lot more lightweight.

I didn't realize this would trigger so many of the old farts. :D :D :D

The discussion does kind of remind me of the good old days when we had a TalkBoard and at least a sense of input and control over new features and such.

There is no more mileage running on any of the major airlines, anyway. It's quite sad.

I resemble that remark! I will just add my voice to those who think this is the reverse of an enhancement.

IBJoel I'd like to revisit my two issues:

* "Yearly Hotel Reward Nights" is really meaningless. For example those generally using "Accor Live Limited" are at a disadvantage as such are not a thing with that program.

(A) "Yearly Hotel Bed Nights" would be a much more indicative metric for a frequent traveler.

AND

What is a "Lifetime Airline Mile"?

(B) Is that lifetime miles flown in a aircraft?
Or, is it an Airline Mile (or point) earned from a reward program?

Until clarified, I will be populating my relevant badges as:

(A) "Yearly Hotel Bed Nights" &
(B) "lifetime miles flown in a aircraft"

I agree that the hotel badge makes no sense as currently labeled. It would be better if it was consistent with some of the other badges, which measure lifetime achievement. So I recommend it be changed to be total number of nights spent in a hotel in your lifetime.

As for airline miles, the only metric that makes any sense is lifetime miles flown. Of course I can only estimate how many miles I've actually flown because I have not been tracking all of my flights back to the dawn of time, and since AA used to track all miles for million miler purpose they don't have a reliable measure of my actual miles flown before they changed how it works. The only other possible meaning of this could be the MM achievement, although people already put that into their Programs tag.

Airline miles is earned or butt in seat? I think I prefer BIS but both could be an option.

I am disappointed that there is no badge for Bronze Swimming Certificate, Gold Swimming Certificate,

I quite like the badges but would like to see number of countries visited allow actual number and for a badge showing number of airports flown in or out of.
But that’s because I have tracked most of mine….

I think the badges are unattractive clutter that adds almost nothing to the user experience. I think it safe to assume that many contributors here have flown a lot, stayed in lots of hotels and visited lots of countries, and I (personally) really don't need to know the details.

I accept that the badges are here to stay, but it would be nice if the empty placeholders could be the same colour as the background - i.e., invisible - rather than grey. I'm never going to select badges to appear in my profile, so I am stuck forever more with a row of empty, grey hexagons beneath my name. And that appears as clutter on everyone's screen.