web x.0
ugh... thumbs down & don't like this
Apple has moved its online support discussion forum into Web 2.0–land by inaugurating a new social-networking service called Apple Support Communities (ASC). The ASC service has been a long time in gestation: it was first announced in mid-August of last year – so long ago that one of the topics discussed in the original …
Is there an App for that?
As an aside, there's a word for Countries, Organisations or people who control free speech with "thou shall not talk about.....".
At the very least Apple should have an "open season" forum where anything can be discussed. Hiding your dirty laundry doesn't make it go away - watch the film Demolition Man for the perfect example.
Most of the topics on the existing forum contain this exchange of posts:
1. "Apple? Why aren't you responding to this problem - I need an answer!"
2. "Dude, nobody from Apple reads this forum, it's for users only"
Users expect someone from Apple to be there, because the forum is hosted on apple.com. After all, many other companies assign staff to "general" discussion forums -- for example, the sprawling boards.ie forums have members from various telcos, utilities and service providers, who respond to customer complaints that appear there.
As a less good example, Nokia do put support staff in their user forum... once you find the damn thing in the maze of the company's different web presences - "support"? "forum"? "conversations"? "discussions"? "ovi"? ah hell, I give up! Even then, you're only ever going to get a fob-off, but at least it's an official fob-off.
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and not censored by anything apple don't approve of.
Seriously, this is very poor, why can they not invest some effort to improve their support/documentation properly without trying to get some half baked comments added for free. MSDN do this, as do others such as MySQL and the user contributed comments are simply not worth reading, fortunately the official the mysql docs are quite good but Apples's/Microsoft's are a joke and only any use if you know exactly what you are looking for and use google to search for it.
From a company that has so much loose change knocking about surely they can make life a bit easier for their users/developers who help keep them in business themselves without resorting to these kind of 'improvements'.