Apple smears Web2.0rhea across online support

What a high score brings?

I thought it gave you a longer, larger and more impressive... Sense of achievement. Right?

PH also gives a longer, larger, etc.

So...

...it's a forum with a pretty skin. How is even Web 1.0?

Fanboi contest...

Dance... DAAAANCE!!!

iHate, well duh.

El Reg FTW

Take a boring subject, and attach a snappy title and bingo! I will now have visions of Apple's Support site being a smelly shade of brown. Well, a little more than normal at least.

Benefits of a high score

We have at last an objective measure of fanboyness.

Steve will keep pissing on you from on high anyway, but at least you'll be one of the first to receive His Golden Tinkle, unlike the non-believers further down.

I'ts Alive!!

From the screen grab: "My iPad is bleeding - is there a solution for this?"

Answer: Shoot it again, until it stops.

To ask a silly question...

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.

In what world is the following even fractionally true?

"... in an attempt to make it easier for Apple-product users to post problems, discuss solutions..."

Apple may offer you benefits and award privileges for your participation in the Site

A bit like those white apple vouchers they used to give away with Apple products? Boy, they saved me a whole bunch of dosh.

The missing feature: Apple's presence.

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.

Bit like stackoverflow then?

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'.