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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.

Comments (286)

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

  • Ryan says:

    Have registered a few days ago but no confirmation email!

  • ADS says:

    Are you planning on integrating Forums and comments on each news article – so we can track replies to our comments ?

    • Rob says:

      No. I know that it remains a bit odd, with comments on articles in one place and a forum in another place (especially as stuff will undoubtedly get discussed twice, once on each side) but there is no easy way around this.

  • Mike says:

    I would think a

    L – Landlords
    G – Gamers
    B – Billionaires
    T – Thatcher

    Thread would go down well here.

  • Alex Sm says:

    Rhys and Rob, thanks a lot for the forum, let’s see how it goes. Hopefully it will become more informative and user-friendly, because the current comments threads are unbearable

  • mkcol says:

    Rhys & Rob
    Are you getting a view of every comment stuck on the forum, or just dipping in like the rest of us?
    Was only wondering if you’d spot comments like mine about YVR being upgraded to A380 next summer so possibly more redemption seats available.

    • Rhys says:

      We have an admin view that helps us keep track.

      But if you ever have a tip off we generally prefer if you email us!

      • Rob says:

        If you pop it in the daily chat thread, we’ll see it. I’d like that to be ‘hot deals’ corner.

        In general, it is trickier for us to monitor forum posts than it is to monitor standard comments but this is our admin problem.

        • yorkieflyer says:

          And that is the case also for the reader! Interesting stuff lost in threads we’ll never go to

          • Rob says:

            It’s two sides of the same coin, sort of. HfP (the news side) works because we effectively strip down everything that is going on globally, chuck out everything not of interest to the UK reader and pick the best stories that remain. You don’t need to work through a global forum, eg FT.

            What we’ve done on the forum side is ditched 90% of the FT forums and, for the 10% we have cloned, ditched the 80% of the content that is not UK relevant. It should be very focused. What we need is a range of ‘discussion’ topics which can run to 50+ posts rather than a ‘what’s the answer to this question’ / ‘it’s this’ / ‘thank you’ format, although there will always be an element of that. It should come as things settle down.

            Where do we end up? People will continue to come to HfP for the news, some will start to come over purely for the forum. The two sides may not crossover much, although we are going to encourage it via various ways. The forum home page will have a summary of the news at the top, and the news pages will have a summary of recent forum topics somewhere.

            We are used to this already, of course – we have 15,000 email readers (plus a lot of Google News followers, Apple News followers, RSS users, Flipboard readers etc) and we reckon 70% never visit the site at all. If we can get a chunk of those over to the site on a regular basis to look at a forum, we’ll be happy.

          • Rob says:

            As opposed to the stuff in the chat thread which 99% of the daily visitors never saw? 🙂

  • Matt says:

    No nesting of the posts/replies in the forum makes it very hard to follow. Shame, I enjoyed the daily chats. Think I’ll come back in a few weeks and see if it’s better.

    • Rob says:

      We trialled nesting yesterday morning, everyone said they hated it, so we removed it.

  • Lyn says:

    Thanks very much to whoever suggested using Ctrl + F5 in the Forum Chat to bring things up to date with nesting etc. It makes so much more sense now.

    • AJA says:

      Any idea how to do that on an Android mobile phone? I can’t seem to reset. Works fine on desktop but a PITA on my mobile.

  • Crafty says:

    Forums need some work I think. Quotes need to be in shaded boxes so one can work out what’s going on, and “view new posts” rather than “view new topics” is essential. High level of control over ability to post new threads is also generally a no-no.

    • Rhys says:

      Quotes are in shaded boxes!

      ‘new topics’ gives you the topics with the most recent posts?

      • Alan Todd says:

        Quotes do appear shaded on Firefox but not on Safari, on my mac at least.

        • Rob says:

          Clearing your cache should fix it. We had similar issues with the site relaunch last year – we make changes on the fly but your cache keeps serving up the old formatting.

    • Rob says:

      Whatcha mean by ‘high level of control’? Anyone registered can start a thread.

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

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