Apple to Roll Out Revamped Support Discussion Forums

[Northgrove]

Will this mean an end to self-promting "experts" spamming every new problem with meaningless voodoo solutions just to up their post-count?

eg: "Repair permissions before and after every update"

LOL, yeah, the old "I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I'll post something that looks helpful now, OK?"

 

[BillyBobBongo]

They'll still delete anything that puts them in a negative light, they can wrap it up any way they choose...it'll still be the same useless support area that it always has been.

 

[yellow]

I can certainly say it's very, very, very (veryveryvery) rare that I can get much out of the Apple Support Forums.

I hope "revamping" includes villagers with torches and pitchforks..

 

[Schtumple]

It would be great if we could ship the iPhone forums there.

Oh god please, it's like a war zone in there, you go in there with any kind of morals and you get slaughtered by newbies.

 

[Tastic Bycrom]

Than perhaps you should move on to porn site forums....

Porn sites have forums? Sweet.

Seriously though, hopefully this can help make their board useful for support rather than whining about censorship. There are other places for that, like everywhere else.

 

[WANGOOROO]

I bet they are outsourcing their "support community" to Get Satisfaction. www.getsatisfaction.com is used by several large companies to build community based support forums.

Pretty cool concept, and the companies that I know which are using getsatisfaction.com seem to be scaling pretty well to the load.

 

[mandoman]

Apple's forums sucks. They constantly censor and remove threads. I doubt they'll do anything to fix that.

 

[BertyBoy]

It would be great if they incorporated some MacRumors features!

OMG I hope not. Let's compare the proportion of posts there that contain sensible questions and helpful information - even if it's not relevant in that case - in the "answers" with what we have at MacRumors. You may want to exclude certain forums, for iPod and iPhone, on both to cut down on the drivel.

There's just far too many threads here that could be answered by the use of Google, or by a bit of common sense. Too many threads asking if a particular item for sale is good value when everyone has their own cost vs. benefit plans. Too many threads ranting about news items or rumours. Too many threads in Mac Gaming on Steam, StarCraft 2 or WoW.

Apple Support Communities (it's been called this already for most of 2010) has three enormous drawbacks:
Apple only products, although you do get a lot of requests for help about third-party products hiding in the hardware or OS-specific forums, and
An awful search engine, use google instead.
Lack of a substantial active user base contributing well-crafted and well-researched questions, too many one line questions - to which I will only give one line answers.
But let's see what the changes are, although it sounds no more "exciting" than it currently is.

 

[eng42ine]

It would be great if we could ship the iPhone forums there.

Thread winner

 

[BJB Productions]

Bout' time Apple... Those forums are so outdated and horrible to use.. That's why I switched to Macrumors support.

 

[pondosinatra]

I am fairly sure yellow was making fun of the situation vs being serious...

<William Shatner voice> - But how do you know? How. Do. You. Know?

 

[BornAgainMac]

Can the "<Apple Product> update on Tuesday" threads be moved to this new Apple discussion board site?

 

[mongoos150]

I wonder if this "major upgrade" will change the Orwellian policies of mysteriously vanishing threads on faulty/defective hardware and software.

 

[ianray]

The Apple iWork forums have been a good source of information in my experience. But Google and MRoogle are invaluable

 

[redgaz26]

not trying to be mean but MR could do with a bit of a revamp aswell.

 

[japanime]

I don't know if others agree, but apple's discussion boards are where people with limited knowledge about apple products are given advice by others with often equal limited knowledge.

I've found the Apple forums to be quite helpful. However, I also find the forums here at MacRumors to be very useful. Both have bailed me out when I've run into problems with my machines that I couldn't figure out on my own.

 

[Dizzler]

Well, I for one hope Apple improves their search function. I stopped using their discussion forums because I could never get the search function to give me usable results.

 

[IndustrialSpace]

This is all about control.

They WANT more users to migrate over to THEIR board where they can impose greater control over the content and censorship. They want to be able to see whats going on socially with their products a little more. Anything they dont like they will delete. Tey will make it less anonymous as well. They will use it to track users and see if what they claim with CS matches up with what they write on boards. Apple would rahter have you wrtie negatvie stuff on their board, not someone elses. This way they have control of the content and can remvoe what they dislike. This is also a move to appear more user friendly, but they are going to make you less anonymous. They'll make the board more like tradional MBs. They'll watch your IP adresses and email accts, etc.

Id be very cautious about this "new" site. Apple is not as customer-friendly as you might think.

 

[redgaz26]

This is all about control.

They WANT more users to migrate over to THEIR board where they can impose greater control over the content and censorship. They want to be able to see whats going on socially with their products a little more. Anything they dont like they will delete. Tey will make it less anonymous as well. They will use it to track users and see if what they claim with CS matches up with what they write on boards. Apple would rahter have you wrtie negatvie stuff on their board, not someone elses. This way they have control of the content and can remvoe what they dislike. This is also a move to appear more user friendly, but they are going to make you less anonymous. They'll make the board more like tradional MBs. They'll watch your IP adresses and email accts, etc.

Id be very cautious about this "new" site. Apple is not as customer-friendly as you might think.

are you for real????? what are they going to do with ip addresses ??
send the apple police round and tell you not to say bad things

 

[gregorypierce]

The Apple forums do need a lot of work, but I'm more interested in whether or not they will continue to heavily censor their forum. If so, it doesn't matter how good it is - its a waste of bandwidth ... though Apple is good at convincing people that their forums are the place you should go to get information about product issues.

 

[gregorypierce]

Apple's forums sucks. They constantly censor and remove threads. I doubt they'll do anything to fix that.

Well, the new forum software might automatically censor and remove threads...

 

[emaja]

I used to help out quite a bit on Apple forums, but they canned their mods and all hell broke loose. No one was there to put jerks in their places and shut them down or hit them with the ban hammer.

I stopped when it seemed like people who came there for help were getting ruder and ruder. I didn't feel like helping people who were jerks.

Apple had a good thing going there for a while, but they didn't keep it a clean and civil place to look for help.

 

[DomC]

There are 4 threads in the 3G forum that have to do with the iOS4 update that have over 800,000 views as of today. What do you bet they don't make the transition?

 

[Damian.]

It's about damn time. Apple's discussion forums are stuck in the early 2000's, a fresh and innovative change is welcome.

So is Macrumors Forums.

 

[tokyopunk]

curious

they probably redesigning it to make it easier to spot and delete any critical statements about their products. Couldn't tell you how many times my posts have been deleted there when I was pointing out a software flaw and wanting support for dealing with it.