Membership-free, limited public access to Apple Developer Forums content

[grahamperrin]

2014

… a significant step forward at last week's Worldwide Developers Conference with the company making a number changes such as loosening non-disclosure restrictions …

2015

https://forums.developer.apple.com/​

– and for posterity, my first capture in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine:

• http://web.archive.org/web/20150610185948/https://forums.developer.apple.com/welcome

Non-authenticated, but not unlimited

https://developer.apple.com/devforums/ states:

Apple Developer Program membership is required to access certain features of the developer forums

– so, for example, searches of forum content are not performed without authentication.

Those limitations aside, I guess that Apple quietly decided to make content generally available to the public whilst focus was on WWDC.

Perceived confidentiality

At https://developer.apple.com/support/forums/ under Be Topical:

Only discuss seeds in the confidential forums.

Some of the published content may be inconsistent with that suggestion, and with contributors' perceptions of part 6 of the Apple Developer Forums 
Participation Agreement (EA1279, 2015-06-02). For that apparent inconsistency, there's an Apple Developer Program access issue (case 822736071).

Openness

Before posting this, I refrained for a few hours. A personal e-mail to someone at Apple, coupled with the report of the access issue (the inconsistency).

Then I found https://twitter.com/olebegemann/status/608186517295665152 – more than thirty-six hours ago and retweeted by more than a hundred people – and later yesterday, WWDC 2015: Interesting Tidbits and Links – MacStories, so it's reasonable to assume that most of the openness is both:

• intended by Apple; and
• known to the authors whose posts are published

– there is encouragement to use a pseudonym, or words to that effect.

 

[grahamperrin]

I wonder whether contributors are aware of the degrees of publicity.

https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/3330#5657 wondered about publicly indexable content; someone responded:

Apple forbids any use of any content on any of its web sites.

That response, verbatim, is publicly indexed

In a topic elsewhere, one of the threads resulted in a question about the beta/pre-release forum, that thread appears to ends with a link to the page where Apple advises:

Only discuss seeds in the confidential forums.

– unless I'm missing something, no group realisation that for the five seed spaces below, forum content is visible to the public, indexed by Google and so on:

• iOS 8.4 beta
• iOS 9 beta
• OS X 10.10.4 beta
• OS X 10.11 beta
• watchOS 2 beta.

https://forums.developer.apple.com/message/9879#9879 there's a realisation:

… relaxing their attitude towards public discussion of beta APIs.

 

[grahamperrin]

How dare you presume that I am the same person as myself. Why, I've never heard of such a thing. I'm outraged by the very implication. In all my days I've never been the same person. Not even once. I utterly reject the possibility.

Land sakes, what is this world coming to? I tell you what.

Land sakes? Oh my giddy aunt.

And the giddier aunt of the two selves of RedBear.

Last but not least, Giddiest Auntie Google and Her use of forbidden content:

(The long period of moderation may be associated with posting a link to a non-Apple site.)

Postscript

Saturday 2015-06-27, I see that moderators allowed the post.