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At 12:17 PM 4/30/1998 +0000, Paul Khoury wrote: >>Further upthread, someone mentioned a suspicion that IBM would have to approve >>every posting on the support forums. If they do, they are using some form of >>automation; I posted a message and it appeared within 5 seconds. >> >Maybe they're using some kind of filter to prevent messages with swear words, or other profane >vocabulary from being shown. At first though I thought it might be monitored by a human, >but I guess that might be impractical with the immense call volume. > >-- >Paul Khoury | <pkhoury@loop.com> | Sent from my ThinkPad 701CS >Proudly running OS/2 Warp 3/4, Slackware Linux, and Sun Solaris 2.4 > IBM has had forums and cforums (customer forums vs internal forums) that predate Notes, newsgroups, etc. The fact that newer (and perceived better) methods are available hasn't been sufficient to change some of these mechanisms. In the cforums I participated in, they were sorta semi-moderated. IBM didn't prevent anyone from posted anything. But after posting, the moderator would remove postings which were deemed inappropriate. Most IBM employees had access to the cforums, and occasionally I think messages were removed that concerned technolgy which had not been "announced". It seemed that their main concern was in opening themselves to lawsuits, plus the profane and/or crude messages were considered unprofessional. So flames that were derogatory to other companies or individuals, or messages that were profane/crude/inflammatory were removed. Negative statements concerning IBM were not normally removed unless they moved into the 2nd category. But the forum process was (& maybe still is) cumbersome and based on older technology. Occasionally I still use them as a separate source to answers to questions - overall the information content was quite a bit above your unmoderated newsgroup or mailing list. Brooks