[caryme]

Forums are tough. I can see why Apple opts not to participate, although I disagree with their decision. It also seems to be consistent with the Apple ethos to remove overly negative posts and calls to action from the apple.com domain. Again, I don't like this, but I'm not surprised.

At Microsoft (at least on my team) we are encouraged to be active in our forums. We use them to keep a pulse on the issues we are having, identify bugs out in the wild, and get feedback on our products. We may sometimes sound a little robotic, since we're not going to divulge insider info or participate in arguments, but we are listening and trying to help (and attempting to figure out what is actually happening on peoples machine's, which is tough). We also provide feedback to our customer service folks in the forums, giving them answers to common problems we do know about and identifying when they provide misinformation and correct that.

I suspect that Apple reads their own forums but doesn't respond. The optimist in me says they're investigating this Wi-Fi issue due to the noise in the forums. They may not have or know a good workaround or at-home fix at this point. And frankly, it's really difficult to get any useful diagnostic information from folks in the forums (especially angry ones who turn to personal attacks on engineers - been there, done that for me on answers.microsoft.com).

[justin66]

> I can see why Apple opts not to participate

As Lessig notes, they're engaging actively in censorship. That's certainly their right, but it's not the same thing as not participating.

[aray]

I have seen many product forums where threads go on and on, and useful information is buried in a avalanche of noise.

On the other hand, censorship/terms-of-service removal is a grey area and by removing the information you're removing the ability of readers to make judgement calls for themselves.

Really, it would be nice if there was a way to filter/optimize the noise of normal forum spew into just the useful bits, while still having context/links to the original ginormous piles. Seems to get the best of both worlds.

[Perceval]

Requiring that posts stay on topic isn't censorship. Terms of Service are Terms of Service. There are lots and lots of other Apple/Mac/iPhone forums around the web.

[justin66]

> Requiring that posts stay on topic isn't censorship.

Censorship is exactly what it is. I understand it's an emotionally or ethically charged term for some, but there is no doubt about what they're doing:

"to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable"

We all understand that there are terms of service. They're enforcing them via censorship. Whether it's the censorship or the ToS that the censorship is meant to serve which are particularly objectionable is a pretty uninteresting argument.

[malandrew]

It's totally within the terms of service as far as I can see, since it is on topic.

Exercising your warranty rights is a perfectly valid solution to a technical problem.

It's always been common to suggest to people that they try restarting their devices to fix a problem or going as far as reinstalling the software in question. When neither of those work, replacing the device if it is non-functional is the next step and exercising your warranty rights is a legit way to implement that technical fix.

[mverwijs]

They could, I'd think, do both. Censor of topic, yet confirm the issue and take steps to fix it.

[vetinari]

I hope that you are not talking about social.technet.microsoft.com. No offense, but I always dread, when I search for a solution and the results contain this site at top positions. I've never found a solution for my problem there, just moderators following a script, without trying to really help.

[caryme]

I'm talking about answers.microsoft.com.