"General Discussion | Travel" has become the de facto Newsstand

Discussion in 'Feedback/Support/Suggestions' started by gobluetwo, Oct 24, 2011.  |  Print Topic

  1. gobluetwo
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    gobluetwo Silver Member

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    Suggestion: Create a separate "Blogstand" forum for Boarding Area blog-generated news or articles; make the "Newsstand" just for MP user-posted news or articles; and let "General Discussion | Travel" fulfill it's purpose to be "A forum for all those travel tales, questions and experiences that can't be folded neatly into one specific category."

    There is a Newsstand forum which is largely filled with autolinks to the Boarding Area bloggers. Because news items being posted by MP users gets easily lost among the blog posts, it seems people have taken to posting the news in the General Discussion | Travel forum, making it the de facto news forum. 29 of the 40 posts in General Discussion | Travel front page at the time of this posting are news articles. Several of them have fewer than 4 responses. This makes it difficult for anyone (particularly new users) with genuine travel-related questions to be seen and get engaged.
     
  2. Gargoyle
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    Gargoyle Milepoint Guide

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    you make very good points. I periodically have posted news stories in newsstand, and they quickly get washed away by the dozens of robo-posts. (at least they appear to be robo-posted).
     
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  3. lin821
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    lin821 Gold Member

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    I've noticed it for quite a while. I tend to report those threads so the admin can move them over to Newsstand Forum.

    But the move doesn't always happen. When it does happen, it always takes days, if not weeks. :(

    General Discussion | Miles/Points Forum suffers the same infestation of misplaced threads. That makes MP, IMHO, a almost FatWallet type of swimming-pool site, which I dislike a lot. This kind of "free-will posting pattern" also makes it very difficult to build and/or find content on MP. :eek:

    I understand friendliness is almost a co-brand name for MP. But when friendliness leads to unstructuredness and/or disorganization, something has to be done. And this something better be fast.
     
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  4. viguera
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    viguera Gold Member

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    Same here. Namely the LOT stuff yesterday and a couple of other news-worthy articles that I saw ended up getting buried under pages of robo-posts.
     
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  5. Gargoyle
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    Gargoyle Milepoint Guide

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    I noticed that- you posted about the LOT incident, very quickly there were 15 robo posts above yours including two more about the same incident, so your post got brushed away.

    I end up posting news stories in the various airline threads where they might be relevant, instead of tossing them into the newsstand. I hope the admin will address this situation.
     
  6. HaveMilesWillTravel
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    HaveMilesWillTravel Gold Member

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    There also seems to have been a recent hyper inflation in the number of Boarding Area blogs, which just increases the problem.
     
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  7. Wandering Aramean
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    Wandering Aramean Gold Member

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    I agree that the auto-posts from the blogs dilute the value of the newsstand forum to the point that it is essentially unusable. Even as one who arguably benefits from those auto-posts (and, yes, it is automatic), I'm not a fan at all.

    To this point, I have to wonder if the issue with the newsstand forum is that the auto-posts dilute it or simply that no one is commenting on the posts anyways. A number of the news articles in the General Discussion | Travel forum are manually put there but no better really than an auto-post as they are content generated by a small number of users, nearly always from the same sources, and with no commentary or thought behind the post other than just posting it in the forum. At that point it is not much different than the blog auto-posts except for the minimal additional effort required to copy/paste to create the thread rather than an RSS feed doing that work.

    Put another way, is there really a difference between the RSS feed posts that get no responses and the "news" posts that get no responses other than how they got into the site? The only difference I can see is that one set are posted in the forum where they probably should be while the others are not.
     
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  8. HaveMilesWillTravel
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    HaveMilesWillTravel Gold Member

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    Since the blurb posted to the Newsstand forum is generally just that... a teaser blurb... I have to go to the original source blog to read the story. And if I then have a comment, I tend to leave it there. Don't see much value in disconnecting the discussion of a post from the actual post and scatter it all over the place. And maybe the blog author even benefits a bit from it through additional web traffic.

    That said, I generally don't go to blog posts via the Newsstand posts, and many of the blogs are already part of my vast collection of RSS feeds. So for me personally the posts mainly are useful when a new blog suddenly pops up, as I can then evaluate if I should start following it.

    Agreed. I think it's very desirable to comment on a particular news article if one takes the time to post a link to it here.
     
  9. Wandering Aramean
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    Wandering Aramean Gold Member

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    Agreed...I meant that the "real" newsstand posts don't get much action anyways so the fact that they are getting pushed down the page doesn't mean that the problem is with the blog posts. But I will reiterate my desire to see that auto-post functionality altered and I've had discussions with the MP folks about this as well.
     
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  10. Tim
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    Tim Admin

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    Thanks for the suggestions regarding the Newsstand. This is something we are considering changing, but we haven't decided on what the best way to move forward with this is yet.
     

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