Apple has decided to do away with its discussion support team, a group of forum hosts that have monitored and moderated its user discussion boards, a new report has confirmed. At times, the boards also became a focal point of the online and mainstream media due to questionable moderation practices. To the dismay of customers, it wasn’t uncommon for staff members to close or completely remove lengthy discussion threads that brought attention to problems with Apple products that the company had yet to officially recognize. But Apple’s decision to do away with its moderation staff has only added to the complaints users have about the boards.
Hopefully Apple will quit closing threads with complaints, as stated in the summary. I recently opened a thread there about problems with Fan noise in the new Intel Minis. Other people posted, and I also posted in another thread about the same problem. There were complaints about Apple’s support, or complete lack thereof about the same problem. Unless I’ve gone blind or Google is broken, neither thread appears to be present anymore. My Mini is currently in service at an Apple Authorized Repair shop….but they are unsure whether Apple will authorize a fix…and I doubt they will, considering other people have stated Apple refuses to acknowledge the problem.
If Apple doesn’t fix it, I will make copies of their advertisements marketing the Mini as silent, and file a consumer complaint against Apple.
There’s no hope. Apple’s community is clearly crumbling away at an alarming rate. Seriously, this is like the third or fourth example in the past week of various Apple communities falling apart.
The users don’t know how to interact appropriately with the developers and community leaders, and vice versa. There’s a major bilateral misconception about the very purpose of the Mac community. The users think it’s a place to vent their frustrations when things don’t work, and the developers/leaders think it’s a place to promote their pet projects and silence the critics. In other words, they think different.
As I’ve said before, I thought Mac OSX was going to keep Linux irrelevant on the desktop. All they needed was to foster a strong community. I’m not saying the Mac platform is doomed, far from it. But they will never be able to take their platform to critical mass, where the development community takes the ball and runs with it. OTOH, the free software platform, which 5 years ago had nothing that compared to Mac OSX on the desktop in any sense, has either already reached critial mass, is reaching that point as we speak, or will do so eventually, depending on who you ask.
I was expecting a bevy of pro and anti-Apple posts; something akin to Gnome vs. KDE.
I was expecting a bevy of pro and anti-Apple posts; something akin to Gnome vs. KDE.
Tastes Great!
Less Filling!
Tastes Great!!
Less Filling!!
It’s kind of ironic that GNOME/KDE flamewars are so intense. Conventional wisdom is that congitive dissonance kicks in when people have a significant investment in a particular worldview. On the other hand, switching between GNOME and KDE is significantly easier than switching between Macs and PCs (I do the former about weekly, I’ve done the latter twice ever).
Maybe it’s something like vi(m) versus (x)emacs: simply by defending their side for so long, people become so attached to it that it becomes a matter of honor.
The only times I’ve gone to the apple support forums was for, you guessed it, support. They served their purpose for me at least.
Go to any support forums run by companies (like comcast) and when a thread turns to bitching about the product or service it’ll be closed. I don’t see what the issue here is. Apple doesn’t want bad press about its products on its own site. They’re within their rights to delete threads.
If you want to bitch about Apple do it on a site that isn’t owned by Apple and moderated by Apple employees.
Well there was no bitching, it was people looking for a solution or even a cause, after Apple turned a deaf ear to their customers who bought a Mini because it is a “silent” computer. 2 comments out of 30 or so complained about Apple turning a deaf ear, and the whole bloody thread and another related thread gets deleted?
Maybe Apple should focus more on keeping their customers happy and acknowledging problems as opposed to stifling their complaints and refusing to deal with problems in their product lines?
Yeah, post to another site so Apple will never have to acknowledge defects. It’s not like you’ve spent several hundred to a couple thousand dollars on one of their products or anything, why would you want them to acknowledge your problems?
I remember when all the anti-windows people loved Apple (this was before Linux) that has continued to this day. Except I think more and more people are just getting fed up with Apple period. Many of the same issues that people griped about Microsoft, are the same things Apple does now. Throw in the fact that Apples are the most propriatary machines out there, it is no surprise that Apple struggles mightly. Add in the fact that they require resellers to give daily status of their sales it is no wonder why nobody wants to deal with them. And now they want to go f**k support. Good job Apple!
By the way, I have on a few occasions seen very strong complaints on Cisco’s own discussion board. I have even added a few, none were ever censored. In fact mine was even responded to with a reasoning. My god, I even see anti-MS posts on their site with people bitching about this and that and those are not locked.
As far as I am concerned, Apple could drop off the face of the planet and I could care less. Especially after having one of their horrible piece of crap X-servers that was soon replaced by a Sun. Hey, the Sun server actually runs, a lot less than I can say for the Xserve.
I gave you a vote +1 because I pretty much agree with what you are saying. I want to say though that Apple isn’t becoming more like MS but rather just a stronger version of its same old self, Apple Inc.
Don’t question the company line. Anything is justified in the name of company profits. Even if we make a mistake, it’s okay because we are Apple and we think different.
Apple has a history of ignoring user problems.
Back in the early days of Mac OS X there were problems with dial-up networking for some users. First connections after reboot would be fine, but subsequent connections would see the computer hang for about 2 minutes after clicking “connect” before it would dial, during which time the machine was frozen and unresponsive. Only having a modem at the time I suffered from this.
This problem was present in pre-release versions of Mac OS X, and remained until about 10.1.5. It was discussed in Apple forums, but remained unacknowledged by Apple for quite some time.
That, however, is nothing compared to this next bug. “lookupd”, an essential system component used to look up machine names and IP addresses, had a fatal bug in it for over 7 years (the bug was present in NextStep). I experienced this on a production server running Mac OS X Server 10.3.9. When it crashes the server will stop responding to any incoming connection attempts and “sudo” will also fail to work.
This bug can also affect Mac OS X desktop machines, although the nature of web servers (lots of incoming connections) makes the more likely to experience the problem.
I was experiencing this problem about once a week on my web server until I isolated the cause and found a work-around. That Apple/NeXT could leave a fatal bug like this present in their OS for about a decade is very poor indeed.
This experience, coupled with the incredibly poor performance that Mac OS X Server exhibits when it runs out of RAM and starts using virtual memory, leads me to the conclusion that Mac OS X Server is not suitable for a production environment.
In both of these cases Apple did not seem to wipe forum discussions, although it is possible that this *did* happen and I just caught threads that Apple did not wipe. They were in both cases conspicuously silent about very serious problems.
Wow… lots of negative apple comments. A few months back, it seems these would have been modded into oblivion.
There aren’t many apple users left to mod people down. They all switched to Linux.
Getting rid of paid mod’s seems like a stupid idea to me. Sure I don’t like threads being deleted but I’d rather have someone form apple controlling the forums rather than an unpaid person (hell it’s not as if Apple is skint).
Too many forums on the net have become a dumping ground for rudeness and ignorance. A prime example is the forums at iexbeta – they used to be good but then the fanboys took over – major abuse is given for not singing Vista’s praises over there now – talk about people putting heads in sand.
I gotta say it……. I think I know the reason. Too many people (expecially young kids) have access to the web nowadays. I’m pretty sure most of the rude posters have not even heard the term netiquette.
I started using the web in Autum 1994 while at Uni (mosaic and later netscape) on HP-UX machines. Pine ruled the world for Newsgroups at that time. Academics were the main web / newgroup / irc users at that point. It’s been downhill slide ever since 🙁
thingi
Edited 2006-08-01 11:40
It’ll only prove the state of the apple community. Only let’s see if apple will hear them or only let a place for whiner.
the iPod is so cute!
All of these “Apple is doomed” comments have been getting old for over a decade. Take one look at Apple’s sales numbers and their products and that conversation is over. Yes, they’ve lost some degree of hardware quality in the last couple generations of their products. However, the frequency of those defects have been greatly exaggerated by the huge number of Microsoft trolls who follow Apple around waiting for it to collapse (despite the fact that it’s been 20 years and Apple is stronger than it has been in a long time). Also, you can expect Apple to make changes in response to all this bad publicity.
As for the support forums, having professional staff is always a bad idea unless a) there are a lot of them and b) they know what to do and what not to do. Clearly, neither were there enough staff members nor were they given the mandate necessary to effectively represent Apple.
The solution here is simple. Bring in the Mac nerds to take over. Keep one PR-minded admin in charge of them in a tiered architecture and you’ve got free support forum moderation that is much better than the expensive forum moderation you had before. Hell, you can even give the upper level moderators little perks (eventually).