Courtesy of OSWeekly.com

Continued...

For quite some time, Apple has hosted discussion forums for their users. These forums provide an alternative way for people with questions to get answers. With so many different Apple products on the market, it's easy to see why they decided to open up a place where the users could congregate and help each other without having to constantly seek out help directly from Apple. After all, there's only so much time in the day, and if experienced Mac users want to provide guidance to the new generation, that just puts a feather in the cap of Apple.

Instead of just letting these users run free on the discussion forums for years, Apple has employed a forum staff that has monitored and moderated the discussions that are happening within this resource. Interacting with other fellow users is fun and all, but it's nice to have some official representation to help clear things up if the need arises. You get the feeling that some company's view their forum members as a seedy community that is unclean to approach, but Apple's representation has made a good statement by showing that they care about the people who love Apple enough to become active members of this online community. Apparently their love wasn’t everlasting though...

Thanks to management, the forum staff has been disbanded because they questioned the value of the forums. This kind of a move just shows how clueless the people in charge really can be, and it also shows how clueless they are about how customer support should work. You can never have too many ways for your customers to contact you. Even if these moderators were Apple employees and tried a little too forcefully to remove any hint of negativity towards Apple, at least they were there, and at least you could feel like what you said mattered to the company. Now, without a team officially casting a watchful eye over this open communication, almost anything is fair game. People have already posted information on how to pirate music and software, and people who may have genuinely wanted to find out how to do innovative things with OS X could be led to tutorials about hacking with the operating system. Having inappropriate content up for all to see on an official company website is inexcusable, and while it may cost some money to employ help in this area, at least its money well spent.