Vist Cultured Code's own forums

Yeah, once upon a time they had a large and active forum. Now they are trying to hide their unsatisfied customers from the public by delinking the forums from their homepage. Wouldn't surprise me if they were completely gone soon.

That's really disappointing. It's a great product. Possibly unruly forum members might have prompted the de-linking.

Cultured Code had such a lot of negative feedback from customers on its forum that it took the unprecedented step of killing the entire forum, tens of thousands of posts by customers discussing the product in detail and often severely criticizing the company for not delivered on promises.

First they removed the link to the forums from the front page, then they made all forum pages no-index on Google. Now they have been removed completely.

In the annals of on-line customer service this must rate as one of most arrogant ploys ever on the part of a software vendor.

Cultured Code already has a large and active forum

Not anymore. . .as David Sanger notes, the forums have been removed. It has been a long downward slide to this point, and I'm not sure what CC can do to recover (at least in my own eyes) from this latest and biggest mistake.

They really never seemed to understand that it was simply their refusal to participate in the forums that led to 90% of the dissatisfaction. There was one long thread back in June that Jürgen finally got involved in, and it almost instantly transformed from complaints and flaming to reasonable discussion, and even praise of Things. When a company doesn't give its users any information to chew on, they have nothing to do but speculate, snipe, and complain. If the company just acts like it is listening, users will put up with almost any other problem.

Jürgen made it clear at one point that the feedback menu item within Things was the way to get in touch with CC. I'd like to suggest that users of Things who are upset about the deletion of the forums employ that method to respond.

The previous poster seem to have overlooked that the forums will be relaunched. Look here:
http://culturedcode.com/things/forums/

Yes Jürgen [ posting as Moby] , but there is no indication that you will reinstate the tens of thousands of posts from customers. Can you confirm that those discussions will be re-instated by Cultured Code?

Everything about this is outrageous.

Cultured Code's consistent refusal to even acknowledge the problems users were having had already marked them out as a company that simply does not understand customer relations in this Internet age.

Now deleting their forums and the thousands of posts, both positive and negative, contributed by users, simply shows that this is a company you cannot trust.

Think about it: what sort of company deletes an entire forum with over a year of posts? And what sort of person is so gutless that he tries to hide his real identity when posting here?

These people are dishonest to the tips of their fingers.

Here is Jürgen Schweizer from Cultured Code (the real one :)).

@David:Yes I can confirm that we will bring over as many posts as possible to the restructured forums. There is a wealth of useful discussions in there. It would be a shame not to have them anymore.

At this moment we are sorting out a few technical problems. If everything goes well, we will be re-launching the forums today together with an accompanying blog post. I expect that the copying over of threads to the new forums will still continue for some time.

@J. F. Herschel: The reason why we needed to take the forums offline for some time (less than two weeks) was because we are copying over threads to the new forums. There will only be three forums instead of four serving a different purpose. Hence the need to resort everything.

We will also be having new posting rules. Mostly because we need to be able to prevent inflammatory post. We had quite a few of them lately, degrading the usefulness of the forums for users seeking advice and help.

The purpose of our forums has always been to help users resolve issues, become more productive, and have more fun using Things. Posting in a respectful and constructive way is a prerequisite. This is why we are not bring over posts that do not adhere to the new rules. We also left some threads with discussion that have become obsolete (for example discussing bugs that have long been resolved).

Well Jürgen I am glad to hear that the forum posts will be saved (even most). There is nothing wrong with complaints and passionate discussion but much of the heat could have been avoided if a different approach had been taken by the company. The main issues were usually missed deadlines and unmet promises for features. Even if the delays were unavoidable a better communications strategy could have defused the situation.

These days open communications with the customer base is 100% the way to go.

I hope that CC can maintain that and going forward can learn from past experience.

Jürgen said:

The reason why we needed to take the forums offline for some time (less than two weeks) was because we are copying over threads to the new forums. There will only be three forums instead of four serving a different purpose.

What does that have to do with anything? You could've copied threads to the new forums which were being held offline, then when you were satisfied with your sorting efforts, swapped the two at the same time, over the course of a single workday.

Instead you shut your customers out. Presumably you were hoping that the "troublemakers" who were trying to get some information about the product they had bought would just go away.

I agree that the forums had become somewhat rancorous and definitely unhelpful lately, but unless you've learned that the reason for that was CC's lack of honest communication, it's just going to happen again.

Also, it was exactly two weeks that the forums were down. Fourteen days, from August 11 (date of the "Not a Roadmap" blog post) to August 25 (date of the "Forums 2.0" blog post).

Having seen the newly launched fora over at CulturedCode's site, I'll stick to GetSatisfaction. There is actually no way for me to discuss what I'd like to see in the product with other users at the official location any longer.

Wow, the time and trouble they could have saved if they had simply understood, from the beginning, how to communicate with their users.

Boy, it just keeps getting better over there. One of the two main CC guys in the forum lashed out at us for, once again, trying to get some information on a update which includes problem fixes and has been in the pipeline for at least two and a half months. There's been no new blog information since the middle of September, and the last two tweets (a month ago) were about marketing.

It had to be squeezed out of them a month ago that the testing for this update wasn't going as planned, and of course there's been no news since. Like I said over there, if they'd just volunteer that information instead of us having to bang on the door, everyone, especially including them, would be a lot less frustrated.