Without a doubt, some people have issues, but I don't think you can gage the overall reliability of a product based solely on a support forum. No one is going there just to post that their system is running properly.
You are assuming the parent poster actually attempted to go through support and work through the issue. I don't see indication of that. If anything, this thread indicates to me that many people form an opinion of a product and never seek support or never seek to revisit the issue and see if it has been fixed.
So you’re judging quality by support forum posts? Isn’t that the very definition of a self selected sample? Who goes into a support forum to post about how well something is working?
A lot of the people here are much more experienced with technology, so our behaviour is going to be different, but I have a hard time understanding why someone would sign up for a forum as a first step for obtaining assistance. Calling the vendor, sure. Using vendor support options that connect me directly to their staff, sure. None of the people posting about the issue mention taking other prior steps in obtaining support (even though a couple of posts from established members say they should).
I suppose posting to the vendor forums is fine if you need support. On the other hand, I do not think it is an acceptable source of information about a security flaw in a product. There information provided is not verified. The sources are not verified. We don't know whether the details are true, a misinterpretation (innocent or malicious), or made up. In other words, there is no reason to trust what is being said. If I came in here suggesting that my computer was hacked, I would expect people to respond with similar incredulity. (I am simply someone who posts to a forum. There is no reason for people to trust anything I say, particularly if the posting doesn't contain detail on reproducing the problem.)
Is there a point of having support forums if you're not going to have official replies to the questions posted.
To me that just shows that no one cares about the product.
I said previously that I think the 'Unofficial' needs to be more noticeable. Once that is corrected, I dont see it as a huge issue.
People are not idiots, but they are generally frustrated about support options. If there are tons of people using GS's unofficial support forums instead of your own, that tells you that your system is broken, and needs to be repaired.
I'm going to be honest with you: I've been on the receiving end of many bad tech support forums.
The worst one is Apple's. There's a reason why they're so famous for their snobby customer service: they don't need to put in any effort because they know most people are going to throw their hands up and buy a new computer instead of trying to fix whatever issue they have.
But I also can't stand Microsoft's forums, because there's always at least one guy who chimes in with a condescending tone, like he thinks he knows more than you do about your problem. And then there's Google, which doesn't even have a real forum at all—just an unresponsive help page that sends you back and forth between different sections until you give up out of sheer frustration.
It's a little bit their fault. They host forums but appear not to tend to them. There's endless trash there from external "experts" that rarely engage with the specific problem and have no particular advice beyond sfc /scannow.
Good troubleshooting advice can be found but good gravy is it hard to dig up.
One person had one issue issue with a single repair ticket. And then amongst a site of hundreds of thousands of users, some also put their single issues in the comments. So what? We could do this with any major tech company. And we do. It's not enough to change my behavior. I want to see the data.
I was happy to provide feedback. Why not just post it here instead of hunting down a support channel? Pretty much every forum has this kind of back-and-forth going on.
The problem isn't that you're that person, it's that 90% of the responses are that person.
I find general forums to give answers that don't answer the question. I find product-specific forums provided by the vendor as a level of customer support, to be much better. I guess that's not always a thing for programming though.
Indeed, I've asked for help on a reddit, because the install instructions said "get stuck? ask on our reddit!" Got zero help, just one person saying "there's no bugs in that build, just follow the instructions" and that was the end of it. sigh. It could have happened anywhere, but redditors seem to relish in having a bad attitude.
Tech support forums hosted by a large company are nearly impossible to be useful. They run them because someone has the good intentioned idea that a lot of people have the same questions, and seeing other people asking and answering the questions could help people solve their problems faster. Also, some people just want to be helpful, so maybe some customers could help other customers.
The problems are many:
a) to be completely honest, many users experiencing problems aren't willing (or able) to read already written messages about their problems. Even when the error message tells them exactly what is wrong and how to fix it, even when the FAQ tells them exactly what is wrong and how to fix it, even when there's a forum post that tells them exactly what is wrong and how to fix it that's suggested when they write their post, they'll still post their same question; or if you have a real live support person, they'll send it in to them.
b) forums are amazingly time consuming to moderate. If you don't let posts go live by default, people will complain about censorship and how terrible it is and write the same post multiple times because they thought it didn't go anywhere. If you do let posts go live by default, people will use your forum to be terrible people and share malware and music and many worse things.
c) As your product changes, many, but not all, old forum posts will become outdated and worse than useless. If you keep everything up forever, it becomes less than helpful. If you throw everything away after some fixed period, you lose out on some information that is still current; and people will waste your time decrying your censorship. If you put a big watermark up on old posts, nobody notices it. If you have someone go through and curate the information, that's a lot of effort.
So, IMHO, a forum costs a lot of effort, and doesn't make a meaningful dent in the support load. Often someone had a nice idea to run the forums, but they couldn't get them staffed for more than 3-6 months, but nobody wants to be the person to kill the forum, so they live on as a ghost town.
It's more effective, again IMHO, to automate the hell out of the support queue, but still have people reading as many requests as possible (even if it's mostly skimming and sending appropriate canned responses), with a path to actual responses as needed. The people running the support queue need to have the ability to influence the product to make their jobs easier. That means a) being able to escalate issues so that common issues are fixed in the product, b) being empowered to fix public documentation (including canned responses) so the wonderful people who read documentation have the right information, c) being able to either directly fix or escalate to have account issues fixed.
Of course, Microsoft and Google tend to be more of a take it or leave it kind of product. I don't expect support from either of them. For Apple, if you want support, you have to go to a store, for the most part; which isn't going to solve complex issues. Limiting your interactions with companies that are too big to care is the best you can do. On the other hand, the cable company and the phone company will come out and fix your lines, eventually, if you bug them enough; they're pretty big and don't really care, but they do have a smattering of support.
Possibly because complaining on hacker news and calling people incompetent on threads they have no reason to personally follow isn't an optimal strategy for receiving tech support.
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