How can I create a small menu of my preferred forums, a la My Flyertalk? It is quite a pain at the moment jumping through the menus to get to the small number of forums I want to frequent, especially as you need to go 'Miles & Points' / 'Hotel' / 'Priority Club' (ie 3 clicks, 3 pages) to get to the forum.
+1 This feature is one of the biggest reasons I'm so active at FT. 'My Flyertalk' saves me a lot of clickign back and forth as well as directly showing what threads have been commented further on since I last posted.
Good question. I find the jumping through the menus frustrating ...and given the rapid growth of posts, it is heading for annoying.
This might be beneficial for you (then again it might not), try using the "What's New?" tab at the top of the page? I know it is not the same but......There is also the "watched threads" tab......
I agree...I love the feel of this site. It is very fresh and usable compared to others but navigating the forums is a bit clunky.
i'm quite happy here as well, but am having a fairly difficult time finding threads i might be interested in. (not to say i haven't found some, as i have, and i started some, but finding my way BACK to them is tricky at times.)
Have you discovered the quick nav menu? Use the diagonal blue arrow at the right of the top and bottom "bread crumb" navigation bars on each page. I'm realizing that My Flyertalk was both a blessing and a curse. It made my experience easy and organized, but helped me get very isolated in just a couple forums; I wouldn't encounter people who didn't frequent the same 3 or 4 forums that I was in. In a way, we built thousands of separate walled islands there.
It's a problem. I'm trying to use "Your News Feed" to solve this. It sort of works. (Click on your name then select it from the right side of the drop down box). Your News Feed is like multi-stalking. It shows you posts made by people you are following. So I picked a bunch of people and am following them. It's still clunky: after you read one post, hit the back button, select the next. The Watched Threads is tricky because I'm "watching" every thread I ever read. Think I have to change my preferences on that and only watch ones that I might want to follow.
What's new doesn't filter and is already too much to easily follow. I've taken to use my watched threads and after reading a thread jumping out into the forum through the link at the top (to spot other threads I haven't watched). Another way is to use quick navigation (NE arrow at bottom right of the page).
Which is fine by me. Yes, there were the occasional threads in TravelBuzz etc of interest, but I have 0% interest in airline forums I never fly or hotel chains I never stay in. Once in a blue moon, one of these might have a promo so great that it would be worth switching, but I catch up with these via View From The Wing and Loyalty Traveller blogs ... not much escapes those guys PS. Very sinister smiley we have here!
Certainly. The one thing that was missing was a central meeting place, where people who fly *A and stay at SPG could meet people who fly SkyTeam and stay at Days Inn. There appears to be such places forming here, and I think that is a key to building a much more cohesive community. Currently the beta and newbie forums are serving that purpose. Also, as shown in the "trophies" page (see the help link / status page) there is a private forum for Silver and above. I was concerned that would be another OMNI, but instead we're building it into an intelligent and cohesive place. As soon as you hit Silver (currently happening an hour after you get 100 points, but whenever it happens you'll get an Alert) please come there, poke around, and contribute your insights and humor. Oh so true. What a strange web of Smilies they've weaved, with which we strive to not deceive.
As a coding suggestion, I automatically ticking the "follow this thread" in threads to which a poster would reply would create a sort of "opt-in" My FT application as part of the Alerts menu.
But the combination communities seem to me an even more isolated. "where people who fly *A and stay at SPG could meet people who fly SkyTeam and stay at Days Inn." I do like organized information and it always bothered me that someone would start a thread in a forum only because they never visited any other forum. I do believe they were call parochial prior to the internet. I for one actually liked meeting those who fly *A and stay at Days Inn along with those who fly Sky Team and stay at SPG..Just kidding. But to be honest I learned more actually meeting pople face to face than was possible to get from a BB. It was and still is the absolute best experience for me and would never give it up.
In fact, this can be switched on in the Preferences tab under your username at the top of the screen.
Same here, after a quick scan of the forums I subscribed to I go over new posts so I can see what's going on elsewhere in the old forum world. I guess a browser-based workaround would be to make a bookmark folder and put into it bookmarks of every forum you want to subscribe to.
Yup, this is a deal-breaker for me as well: if I can't watch an entire forum, there's no sensible way to stay up to speed with the airlines and hotel programs I care about. Following people or threads I've already found is not a substitute, since just because I (say) like someone's trip report writing style doesn't mean I care about their factual posts in the airline-I-never-fly forum or the hotel-I-never-stay-in forum.
