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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.

  • Track says:
    16 Dec16 December 17:38

    Have just Hilton introduce a daily food credit at all properties, or am I reading the news wrong?

    • Peter K says:
      16 Dec16 December 18:20

      Just USA from my email, and not at some “free breakfast for all” properties like Homewood Suites.

    • Lady London says:
      16 Dec16 December 20:03

      Yes replaces free brekky for Gold and Diamond. An insulting amount given the loss.

      Was a so-called trial only to end of this year. Miraculously now in 2022 too.

      Rest of the world next as soon as Hilton think they can get away with it

    • Andrew J says:
      16 Dec16 December 23:13

      No more Hilton free breakfasts, no more HFP daily chat, it’s not been a good week 🙁

      • Paul says:
        17 Dec17 December 08:25

        Oh I don’t know, the Tories lost North Shropshire, brightened up my week enormously

      • Rob says:
        17 Dec17 December 08:42

        Nothing has changed with Hilton. The breakfast thing is US only and has been running for 6 months already. Most people seem to like it, especially those who cannot expense alcohol because you can take your credit as beer.

  • Talay says:
    17 Dec17 December 03:26

    Don’t want a forum you said. Now you do. Ok but it won’t be the same and what made you different is lost.

    Not saying it won’t be better and from a fiscal side, I sure see the rationale and perhaps the reality of monetisation could not be done through the original style but something will be lost.

    You’re in a far bigger fight now.

    • Andrew J says:
      17 Dec17 December 06:44

      Indeed. The HFP community has been lost, all very sad.

    • Rui N. says:
      17 Dec17 December 06:58

      Rob has been saying that they’re working on a forum for many months now.

      • Andrew J says:
        17 Dec17 December 08:31

        And now the sad day has finally happened and the community that was is over.

        • dst87 says:
          17 Dec17 December 09:12

          It could be really helpful to explain what you think is ‘over’ or missing from the forum format. I’m not saying you don’t have good concerns or suggestions, just that without expressing them nobody can actually do anything about it.

          Just saying “I don’t like it” isn’t very constructive.

          • Rob says:
            17 Dec17 December 09:55

            Apart from the inability to nest replies (which we could turn on just for the chat thread, albeit it requires dedicated IT work to just use it on one board instead of forum-wide) there is nothing different about the chat thread over there …. except that questions have been moved out of it.

            I don’t see what would be different if the chat thread was still in its old place and we banned people from asking airline or hotel brand specific questions in it.

            On a very quick count the forums did around 12,000 page views yesterday. The chat thread for exactly a week before (9th) did 12,612 page views. There’s no real difference and the forum number should grow as the amount of content increases and Google indexing takes place.

    • Rob says:
      17 Dec17 December 08:38

      Except we’re not. The core user base of BA Flyertalk is a fraction of our readership, and the technical knowledge required to use that place properly is huge. Ask a simple question and you will be chased off the board. Bottom line is that we can own this space in the UK if we choose to.

      Also worth noting that the chat thread has only run for 18 months. It’s not as if it has been there for 10 years.

      In truth, the reason we couldn’t run a forum on the old site was technical – it was a fixed 900 pixels wide. It was physically not possible. We now have literally double the width to play with, excluding the side bar.

      • meta says:
        17 Dec17 December 09:17

        Actually Bits served as sort of daily chat before pandemic. I like the idea of a forum, but my biggest issue still with it at the moment it just doesn’t look well on mobile and it’s really hard to use on a iphone. I might have used the desktop site 9-10 years more extensively, I hardly ever go now.

        I appreciate that you are working hard behind the scenes to make it better. Change doesn’t happen overnight, so it will take some time.

      • Andrew J says:
        17 Dec17 December 10:45

        I think it’s the scrollability of the old daily chat which was good, you could very easily scroll through the pages on your phone, see what’s going on, if it was a rant about Boris you could skip over that, or about some code worded chat for MS which I’m not interested in, skip over, or someone telling us about the 12th time they’ve rebooked their Kimpton stay, skip over, a bit like on Instagram or Facebook, scroll and skim until you see something useful or interesting, which you did on most pages. Now it’s a click into a subject, to see what it’s really about, scroll down to the latest bit because the top item is days old, then navigate through huge quotes of the same text to try and see what people are answering. Like others have said, very off-putting and means I’m really not looking at the site much, which is a shame, but I’m sure there are other places to get my information and spend my spare time.

        • Rob says:
          17 Dec17 December 12:05

          Clarification of topic titles is something we can deal with – and indeed is something we do plan to deal with, because it benefits us too (Google isn’t going to serve up a thread as a search result if the title of that thread is not clear).

          Whilst I have been deliberately keeping out of the forums so far, it will be more of a ‘benign dictatorship’ than, say, Flyertalk for the overall benefit of users.

          • Bagoly says:
            18 Dec18 December 10:55

            Yes, please do moderate firmly in the sense of changing titles/splitting threads etc.
            I reckon that most forums (all sectors) would benefit from this.

            When information supplied is definitely wrong (or becomes wrong with time) it is good to mark it so: one way would be to Reply, but you have that switched off; perhaps “Moderator Comment” or colour coding or somesuch?

  • xenole says:
    17 Dec17 December 06:21

    I wanted a forum to separate all the everending Curve etc. stuff from things that might be of use, but to be honest, having seen it, I prefer the general chat.

    • Rui N. says:
      17 Dec17 December 10:38

      So, you want a private daily chat where you only see what interests you? So, maybe something with titles so that you can quickly see of what might be of interest or not? Humm, I wonder what that might be called….

      • Andrew J says:
        17 Dec17 December 11:22

        Well I think what they are saying is that they thought they wanted that, but having seen how it works, they want to take that request back and keep things as they were.

    • JerrySignfield says:
      17 Dec17 December 12:22

      A simple section on Curve would solve that

      • Rob says:
        17 Dec17 December 12:38

        If we get a lot of Curve threads in the ‘Other’ section, we’ll start a ‘Curve’ forum. It’s that simple.

    • yorkieflyer says:
      17 Dec17 December 23:36

      Yes me too

  • Aston100 says:
    17 Dec17 December 09:34

    Once the new forums are properly ironed out, I’m sure many of those who are complaining will find them a far better experience overall.

  • thomas says:
    17 Dec17 December 11:21

    American Airlines no longer allowed on Awards Wallet

    • Rob says:
      17 Dec17 December 12:01

      It came off once before – AA claimed ‘security issues’ which mysteriously disappeared when AW agreed to pay them a fee. Might be posturing.

  • JerrySignfield says:
    17 Dec17 December 12:23

    Add a section on Curve much more popular than say COT

  • Paul says:
    17 Dec17 December 13:59

    please bring back the daily chat thread! Forum is good for threaded topical conversation but chat thread was brilliant for general discussion. Missing it a lot.

  • Sam says:
    17 Dec17 December 14:35

    Argh, the Home link in the content footer is now Forums! Was rather handy on mobiles

    • AJA says:
      17 Dec17 December 14:45

      I agree I miss that “Home” link when on my mobile. On desktop it is easy to refresh everything as the menu bar stays visible and you can easily click on HfP logo or the Home button.

    • Rob says:
      17 Dec17 December 15:24

      We’ll change it back. It was temporary to get Google to index the forums.

      • Harrier25 says:
        17 Dec17 December 16:22

        Poor Rob. I bet this is all becoming a bit of a headache for you guys!

        • Rhys says:
          17 Dec17 December 16:23

          Not really, to be honest.

          There’s always resistance to change – we had it last year when we changed the theme too. In the end it works out for the best!

          • Rob says:
            17 Dec17 December 17:25

            It’s the same as it was for the redesign. We get it to 90%, we throw it open and then we tweak it for the last 10% based on feedback.

            We’d only be concerned if the site had crashed, if it clearly wasn’t working on certain devices or if page views had collapsed, but none of those three have happened.

            We will continue to tweak, but you need to remember that we don’t have a full-time IT developer and our work gets slotted around other projects.

          • yorkieflyer says:
            17 Dec17 December 23:39

            Doesn’t mean your right though 😎

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

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