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We’ve tweaked the HfP forums – this is what is new

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Thank you to everyone who signed up for the new HfP forums. We have had over 2,500 registrations so far which is great, and the daily readership exceeds the readership of the old chat thread.

We have rolled out a few changes today in response to your feedback. More tweaks will follow but we wanted to get these live before Christmas.

To see these changes you may need to refresh your browser cache. On a Windows PC, this is easy – press CTRL and F5 together. On an iPhone you need to go to Safari in the settings menu (don’t open Safari itself), then Advanced, then Website Data. Type ‘headforpoints.com’ into the menu box and swipe right on the result to delete the cached style settings.

For Android, go Settings -> Site Settings -> All Sites -> [search for headforpoints] -> Clear & Reset.

You can now toggle between the forum index and Recent Topics

A lot of people seemed to miss the (admittedly small) button marked ‘Recent Topics’. This lists all of the forum topics in order of when the last comment was made.

It is very useful for people who don’t want to cherry pick just one board, such as the British Airways board, but are keen to see what is active across the entire forum.

You can now easily toggle between the forum index:

….. and recent topics:

The text swaps over instantly without reloading the page, making for as slick an experience as we can manage.

We have added links to the latest news stories to the forum page

We have inserted links to our three latest news stories at the top of the forum:

This means, for people who are more interested in the forum than the latest miles and points news, you can set headforpoints.com/forums as your entry point to the site. You can be sure you won’t miss out on the latest news.

What is important to us is that there is a good flow between the news part of the site and the forum. We will soon add a direct link from the mobile home page to the forum for the same reason, to avoid you having to go via the hamburger menu.

We have also added, underneath the forum, links to the posts with most comments from the previous week.

You can mark a thread as a Favourite

To help you keep up to date with conversations you’re interested in we’ve also enabled a feature that lets you mark a topic as a ‘favourite’. You can do so by clicking the top right button at the top of every thread:

forum favourites

To view your favourites, simply go to your account page and select favourites. This will display a list of all your favourited topics.

You can just as easily unfavourite a topic.

Conclusion

Thanks again to everyone who has been leaving feedback both here as well as on the forums. The new changes should improve the usability of the forums further. If you have not already registered then you can do so here.

After Christmas we will do a further round of minor tweaks so please do leave any further feedback you have.

Category

General

Comments (96)

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

  • youneedtobeyourself says:
    22 Dec22 December 08:49

    My posts keep getting flagged for moderation on the chat threads.

    • youneedtobeyourself says:
      22 Dec22 December 08:49

      OK, they don’t today 🙂

    • Rob says:
      22 Dec22 December 08:56

      Odd. Will have a look. Sometimes happens accidentally, ie we have to delete a comment because it replied to one we found offensive but your account is automatically flagged too.

    • Ladyshopper says:
      22 Dec22 December 09:58

      Every reply I’ve made (including one jut prior to this one) has needed moderation.

      • Rob says:
        22 Dec22 December 10:13

        No idea – you’re not on any block list of ours. However, I should say that the spam filter is a global cloud-based one, not a HfP one. People can be blocked or have comments marked for some reason on a totally different website and it will still impact whether the spam filter approves it on HfP.

  • JohnTh says:
    22 Dec22 December 09:02

    Should you use Reply instead of Quote or is that the problem. Nested replies work better & mean no need to use Quote.
    Quote makes it hard to read as large block repeated (unless original text can be italicised or something?)

    • mark2 says:
      22 Dec22 December 09:20

      I agree completely. This is nothing like what expected; a big downgrade from what we had before. I am amazed that such software is even on the market!

    • Rob says:
      22 Dec22 December 09:42

      We can do something about quoted text – making it smaller might be easier as it would also tighten up the pages and lead to less scrolling.

    • dst87 says:
      22 Dec22 December 11:01

      Quotes are visually distinct. I can only speak for myself, but I find it very easy to just ignore the quoted block of text when reading, and then it’s easy to refer to if you’re not sure what the comment is in response to.

    • Lady London says:
      22 Dec22 December 11:51

      And so much worse on a mobile. For chat thread at least. Quoting probably helps if anything, as more specific topic threads get longer.

  • Navara says:
    22 Dec22 December 10:16

    Rob any reason you didn’t use the software we had on Paidtoshop?

    • Rob says:
      22 Dec22 December 10:26

      It needs to integrate into the existing site. This software is specifically designed for WordPress and uses all of the existing functionality, eg registration system, anti-spam system, back-end comment management etc. It makes it very lightweight.

      There is more advanced forum software which runs on WordPress but it doesn’t integrate as well, either visually or technically, albeit that you can get some additional functionality. We need to keep the existing header and sidebar in place for example.

  • David says:
    22 Dec22 December 10:48

    Personally, it would be better if the daily chat thread stopped, and we just had a general chat section.
    The need for a new thread each day makes it hard to find things, and also hard to resume conversations when a further bit of info emerges.

  • AndyGWP says:
    22 Dec22 December 12:06

    Have the Captcha issue been sorted (tho I’m becoming very adept at identifying buses now) 🤣

    • Rob says:
      22 Dec22 December 14:07

      We use invisible captcha – you shouldn’t see anything.

      • AndyGWP says:
        22 Dec22 December 22:24

        Defo getting CAPTCHA a lot on the forums 🤔 other people reporting it too (and I just had it again just now when I posted there… boats this time tho – keeping me on my toes!!)

  • JamesBrown says:
    22 Dec22 December 15:47

    Just a question, no challenge intended: how do you see the positioning of the forum against Flyertalk, the BAEC form in particular ?

    • Rhys says:
      22 Dec22 December 15:48

      Flyertalk is a mine of information but it is also excessively technical with acronyms etc. We’re hoping the HfP forums will be slightly more approachable and easily understood!

      • Rob says:
        22 Dec22 December 17:11

        This is how we usually explain it to people. There are 5m Avios accounts in the UK, we have around 50,000 regular readers, Flyertalk’s BA board has around 5,000. These represent increasing circles of enthusiasm / geekness / choose your own wording. We will discourage, indeed will delete, acronyms etc which are not reader friendly.

        We are also running a curated UK focused site which should filter out all the noise in the non-BA boards on FT which simply isn’t relevant to you. 1 new IHG thread per day is better than 10 new threads of which 9 relate to IHG hotels in obscure corners of the US. Let’s see if it works.

  • Max says:
    22 Dec22 December 20:26

    Quotes from previous messages are not formatted differently, it’s really confusing.

  • Mark says:
    22 Dec22 December 20:52

    My gripe is the London centric positioning of both the blog and the forum. The standard response is 80% of readers are London based £100k income, so cater to that audience. Which is fine if the blog wants to remain stuck in a niche,

    Often I find more value from US centric blogs that have wider coverage of topics than the inward looking HfP.

    Although I’m sure the Stans will shout me down with the mindless subscription/charity argument

    • Rob says:
      22 Dec22 December 21:18

      Since Rhys/I have not started a single discussion thread yet, any South East bias is clearly coming from readers themselves!

      This is a site for British Airways frequent flyers, in general, and they tend to live in London because that’s the only place BA flies from. HfP is led by the readership, not the other way around.

    • Mikeact says:
      22 Dec22 December 22:00

      I assume you’re in the 20%. If I remember correctly, nobody is forced to subscribe, certainly not us 80%.

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

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