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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.