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NOW LAUNCHED: Join 2,500 readers in the new HfP forums

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We have launched the Head for Points forums. Please join us!

Many of you will know that we have been planning to add forums to the site for some time. Initially, we planned to do it soon after we launched the new site design in August 2020, but life got in the way.

Sinead went on maternity leave and I took over the commercial side of the business for nine months, leaving Rob to do the majority of the writing. This left us with little time to work on bigger projects. Luckily Sinead is now back which has freed me up to work on this, with the help of our IT partner Neil Barrett @ Enbecom.

We launched the forums this week. Over 2,500 readers registered in the first 10 days and we have ironed out most of the bugs and glitches.

HfP forums screenshot

How to join the Head for Points forums

You can register for the HfP forums here. Note that your forum login can also be used to comment across the site.

Your first post / comment to the site will go through moderation to avoid spam registrations. If you cannot see your post immediately please bear with us as we process these.

If you have any problems registering or encounter any bugs or other technical issues, please leave a comment below. We have also created a dedicated topic on the forums where you can leave any suggestions you have here. Of course, if you have trouble registering then you won’t be able to post there 🙂

If your comment would require sharing any personal data, email your query to rhys@headforpoints.com instead.

How to navigate the forums

If you head to www.headforpoints.com/forums or click the link which will appear in the navigation bar later today you’ll see we have a number of forums dedicated to miles, points and travel in general. This should make it easier to find the information you are looking for versus searching old chat threads.

We have also added a ‘London life’ thread for off-topic questions about restaurants, going out, property or whatever. We may add other non-travel forums if there is demand.

If you want a quick overview of active conversations then I suggest using the ‘Recent Topics’ page. This is linked in the top right of the dedicated forum menu (or you can access it here) and lists all topics by most recent response. It’s a particularly useful way of keeping abreast of the entire forum.

Have we got the categories right? Only time will tell. We have done our best to second-guess what you will want to ask about. We will keep an eye on things and delete / add sections as necessary.

We have deliberately kept the forum ‘light’. You cannot have a linkable online profile, you cannot have a signature, you cannot upvote or downvote replies etc. From our side, we will keep your reading experience clean by not placing any advertising in the forum.

What you can do, for five minutes after posting, is edit what you have written – this was a much-requested feature in the old chat threads.

What will happen to the daily chat threads?

A daily chat thread will be opened each morning IN THE FORUM and not in the main news feed. There will be a new ‘daily discussion’ thread each day which will work in the same way as the current chat thread.

It will appear at the top of the forum listings so you won’t need to scroll down to see it.

The daily chat thread in the forum is a good place to, for example, post links to an interesting new offer you have found. However, we strongly suggest that any questions which can be asked in a dedicated forum thread are asked there. This will allow us to build up a strong Q&A database for the benefit of future readers.

It will obviously take a while for the forums to gain momentum, but we hope that we can create something that is both informative and entertaining. As with the site relaunch last year, you will see tweaks as the system beds down – readers have already given us some good ideas.

There are links to the forum in the HfP menu bar. We are working on ways to show a feed of current activity on the ‘news’ side of the site.

Thank you for your continued support of HfP.

Category

General

Comments (286)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • shottenden says:
    13 Dec13 December 08:11

    Easy to create an account and lots of info

  • kipto says:
    13 Dec13 December 08:40

    Spoke to Amex platinum card customer services yesterday reminding them that not all their cardholders shop in Bond Street and to vary the offers that come with the card.

    • Rob says:
      13 Dec13 December 08:56

      Don’t worry, I’m sure they’re working on a Sloane Street deal for those who won’t head that far east.

    • TGLoyalty says:
      13 Dec13 December 11:45

      Would’ve been nice to get the Bond Street offer … some of us live outside London but a enjoy a trip in ….

    • Cranzle says:
      13 Dec13 December 12:45

      The offer is not funded by Amex. If London based companies want to do an Amex offer, should Amex refuse?

      • Rob says:
        13 Dec13 December 12:58

        The question is who organises it. There is something called the Bond Street Association which most of the shops pay into, and I am sure it was behind this. Amex isn’t going to spend time arranging deals with loads of individual stores.

  • M says:
    13 Dec13 December 08:45

    Fantastic news 🎊

  • Flyer11 says:
    13 Dec13 December 11:03

    No thanks.

    Will stick to Flyertalk!

    • Rob says:
      13 Dec13 December 12:02

      This will be a different sort of user to FT. If you’ve got a tricky question about GGL requalification etc I’d still be recommending people go over to FT if they want a quick answer.

    • dougzz99 says:
      13 Dec13 December 13:29

      I’ll use both, because I have too much time and when not travelling like to read about people that are.

  • CarpalTravel says:
    13 Dec13 December 13:36

    I wonder who won the race to register the username Andrew. 😀

  • Sina says:
    13 Dec13 December 13:48

    I really liked the idea that I could reply to someone’s question just by pressing a simple Reply link, now I have to register, login and post and reply to someone’s post, etc…

    Same with asking a question, that’s why I don’t like forums, also after a year, there are 2000 pages on one question that was asked a year ago!

    @Rob could I suggest that you keep the chat page going as well instead of replacing it with the forum?

    Personally think fi you added some options to the comments section, there would be no use for a forum.

    Also good luck with it and hope it’s a success for you, Rob!

    • dst87 says:
      13 Dec13 December 14:15

      I have to disagree strongly here. Content on the HfP Daily threads gets very quickly lost, isn’t searchable, and it’s very hard to keep track of new replies as they get embedded on previous pages. Without scanner each page throughout the day, you can’t see replies and discussion as it unfolds.

      “I really liked the idea that I could reply to someone’s question just by pressing a simple Reply link, now I have to register, login and post and reply to someone’s post, etc…”

      Most of that is identical to the chat posts… the only extra step is registering, but that’s a one-time deal. Otherwise the process is the same, but you can more easily quote people.

      “Same with asking a question, that’s why I don’t like forums, also after a year, there are 2000 pages on one question that was asked a year ago!”

      That’s the BENEFIT of a forum. The conversation on a single topic is kept in one place, and people can easily follow it without having to filter out all of the irrelevant conversation. How many times has a topic spanned multiple days of “daily chat” posts? For all but the hardcore reader, it’s impossible to keep track. Forum threads make that much easier.

      Of course some forum threads can get off topic or become sidetracked. If that happens, it’s an admin decision what happens. In the best run forums, off-topic posts will be split into their own topics, and unruly threads will be closed / locked.

      If / when the team adds the option to subscribe to threads and receive email notifications for new posts to those threads you’re interested in / have subscribed to, it’ll be even easier to keep up to date and contribute without a massive time investment.

      • Rob says:
        13 Dec13 December 14:57

        Yup. The only difference is that you can’t ‘nest’ comments in the chat thread, but hopefully there will be less need for it as questions get asked in their relevant forums and not the main thread.

        There are pros and cons to doing this. In the short term it will probably cost us page views, to be honest. In the long term, the site should benefit because Google will index the forum and send more people our way.

        One upside is that everything is now posted chronologically so you no longer need to search through every page of the chat thread to see what has been added. Go to the last page and you’ll be up to date more quickly.

        We did debate whether to keep the chat thread in the main news feed – even last Friday we hadn’t made the final decision – but we couldn’t see an easy way of stopping people posting questions in it which would work better (for everyone, long term) in the forum.

        Let’s see. There is no additional advertising on the forum pages vs the old chat thread, so we’re not being driven by ad revenue. We simply want to provide the best reader experience possible (which, of course, will get us readers and therefore revenue in the long term).

        • Sina says:
          13 Dec13 December 16:30

          Thanks for the reply, I fully understand your points, it’s just that the simplicity of dealing with HfP website and comments was the USP for me!

          Tried to follow the conversation today on the forum but couldn’t 😬

      • Aston100 says:
        13 Dec13 December 20:49

        +1 to everything DST87 said here.

        • Brighton Belle says:
          14 Dec14 December 07:50

          +1 I liked the serendipity of the old chat thread as you saw comments about stuff that had never occurred to me. The forum is a bit of a turn off but I’ll get used to it eventually if I have a burning desire to get a specific question answered.

  • mutley says:
    13 Dec13 December 14:30

    Bravo for forums, perhaps a regional thread, say northern or Scottish, and maybe a LGBTQIA+ thread.

    Cue the abuse.

    • dundj fka David D says:
      13 Dec13 December 17:17

      No abuse required.

      Both are very sensible suggestions. Though I would suggest regional (split accordingly) and London.

    • roro says:
      13 Dec13 December 19:18

      Genuine question so no abuse please – but – Why would you need a LGBetc thread on a travel site – I would have thought that everything on here is gender neutral – unless that’s the problem

      • mkcol says:
        13 Dec13 December 23:09

        Being LGBTQ+ isn’t about your gender.

        Anyway a traveller’s experience can be influenced from many perspectives, your sexuality is a huge one especially living in a heteronormative world.

      • Toppcat says:
        14 Dec14 December 08:38

        There are also quite a lot of travel destinations which aren’t as LGB++ friendly as the UK, and discussion of the experience people have had in those countries might be useful for some.

  • James Harper says:
    13 Dec13 December 16:21

    This looks like a great development – thanks for doing it and I look forward to both contributing and learning.

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

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