I know there is resistance to forum bloat, to creating too many new sections, but it's been a year and Newsstand remains very problematic. It's a robo-news feed that moves very fast, with very few page vies. As a result of the speed of robo-posting, any news story that a human member posts gets buried and lost in a few hours. Therefore members have given up on contributing anything to that forum. It is a very weak side of MP, whereas it could/should be something that strengthens and contributes. When I find a news story that I want to share, I either search another place to put it (for example, the snake on a plane Qantas story yesterday, which I put in the Qantas forum, where very few people will notice it) or, more likely, I just don't bother posting it. Due to this structure, we have a wasted low view newsstand forum and lots of lost opportunity to get stories contributed by members. How about splitting newsstand into two sections- news feeds and news story/discussion?
The current system sucks. Period. I cannot imagine that the SEO benefits to the Boarding Area blogs are worth not having a useful place to share news. I've simply ignored the user which creates the auto-posts as a small way to help the situation but it sucks.
Good suggestion. A single page with newsstand links and summaries, similar to the boardingarea.com home page, would be of more interest to me than the auto posts.
The entire Newstand setup is terrible, and I think it comes up every now and then how much people hate it. Don't get me wrong, I'm always perusing through and it's often the first section that I read -- to catch up on good deals / news / etc -- but I wouldn't dare contribute anymore, since I know whatever anybody says will only be visible for a few minutes. I rarely follow through and comment on the appropriate BoardingArea blog itself either, because let's face it... very few people want to actively have "conversations" in the comments section of a bunch of BoardingArea blogs. I know people will occasionally drop their two cents or reply to a specific comment (or comment for a contest ) but it's not very conducive to having actual meaningful conversations, so I'm sure I'm not the only one who stays away. The result is a news item that's worthy of conversation, but ends up with a few comments on one of the 987 BoardingArea blogs, and the "real" conversation takes place inside one of the general "hangout" threads like The Penalty Box.
There have been over 500 robo threads created in newsstand since the last time a living member started a thread there. Members have completely given up on sharing news stories in the newsstand. How about just renaming that forum to "blog snippets" instead of "newsstand", to properly reflect the reality of that forum. And then give us a new blog-free newsstand section, where we can actually share news stories.
I think you'll see some changes in that area this week. In case you haven't noticed, we have been making other modifications during the week such as the new Club Carlson forum, the new General Discussion | Credit Cards forum and other modifications. News Stand is on that same list of changes which the others are on including a reorg of ConcourseZ, etc. We haven't forgotten.
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