Before blogs were king I ran community based forum web sites. I would grow the community, allow it to flourish, find moderators that I trusted then when it was self-sufficient I would move on to my next community. It was fun, hard work and I learned exactly what to do and what not to do.

I have not run a forum for a while, but once in a blue moon I stumble across a technical support forum. Many times I want to do something my product was not designed to do and so I post my question in their support forum. This is a great way to get information from the community of users who may or may not have an answer for me.

We at Technology Evangelist have 3 high quality USB microphones. I would like to extend these microphones beyond what they were originally designed to do and make both of them run in SoundTrack Pro at the same time. This is clearly not the problem of the microphone manufacturer, but I would still like to ask someone how to make this happen. Rather than bug the vendor about it I figured I would ask my question in their support forums. This saves the the support phone call where I am told that "what I'm trying to do is not supported" and it possibly gets me an answer to my question. This all makes the company look great in my eyes even if the problem can't be solved, right?

Wrong.

I posted my original question asking for guidance on January 24th. The forum states that some messages may take 24 to 48 hours to go live. Fine. I wait 24 hours, nothing. I wait 48 hours, nothing. January passes and we move to February, still nothing. I'm starting to get a little pissed now. I just want to know if it's possible to do what I want. If I can't do it, that's OK I have a different solution but at least I asked the community. I thought maybe I had done something wrong, so I e-mailed the admin of the forum. Almost immediately I got a response back saying that the inbox was full and my message was rejected. OK, fine. Maybe they just let someone go who took care of this, so I sent a message to support asking for help in getting my message posted. That message also got sent back to me as a full inbox, however, someone did actually respond in kind (odd that I got an inbox full error but they still got the message). The company representative explained, "Unfortunately, our forum is heavily moderated due to the large amounts of spam and other derogatory posts we used to get." Understood.

Here's the problem with moderating a forum like that. You have to actually moderate it! I can accept waiting a few hours for a post to go live, but not much more. Waiting days upon days for posts and then having to e-mail asking to have my post go live is not an acceptable answer. Rather than act as a useful tool for me and grow my acceptance with the company, now I'm pissed at them and want to return the product even though nothing is actually wrong with the mics themselves. If the company is not willing to moderate the channel, then there are ways to cut down on spam

Moderating a forum and killing any message that's not pro-product is a really bad idea. No product is perfect, some people won't like said product. Pretending that these people don't exist does not make it any better. Someone may not like the product for the very same reason that I won't like it. Yes, this will prevent me from buying it, but it will also prevent me from returning it and forcing the company to re-take inventory of the product, which in turn costs them money. The worst thing in the world is to allow the post to go live then remove it, assuming the post was done in good taste. A post with swearing, spam or anything that does not contribute to the community as a whole can go away without a second thought. A post that's against the product but well thought out, well, there's no reason it should not go live.

If a company can't get posts online as fast as possible and not over-moderate the forum, then maybe it's best that they don't run a forum at all. I have decided to sell the original mics and go with a mixer solution. An interesting example of where support forums work is with Mackie. I was looking at a Mackie Onyx 1620 mixer and found out that the Firewire board would not do what I wanted. In the Mackie forums other users complained, one user found a solution and now I'm looking at buying that board again. It's amazing support that requires very little effort on Mackie's part.