Excuse me seeming to parrot Wolfgang�s posting, but he makes good points and I'd like to expand on them.
I disagree that it's about disliking a "non-techie to post a reply/comment to the SMTNet forums." It's not about WHO posts. It's about WHAT is posted. The purpose of the forum is to transfer information to help people do their jobs. The measure of this is: Who benefits from a posting. Self-serving posts are undesirable. Clear and unbiased postings that benefit others are desirable.
I agree with you when you say, if someone �provides incorrect or blatantly false information about a supplier or one of their products�, the supplier should jump into the conversation and correct the false information / misunderstanding. It is very easy to get information incorrect. It is very easy to misstate things. It is very easy to misunderstand things. I think the supplier should do every thing available to them to correct misunderstandings and untruths about their product.
I'll take this a step further, I believe that everyone reading the forum has a responsibility to challenge comments made that are unclear, misinformed, flat wrong, or otherwise inaccurate. When someone does not understand something, they should question the statement.
Continuing, let me take your statement on the �rights to this open forum� a step further. When you say suppliers that are correcting a misstatement have �same rights to this open forum as you and the other technical people.� I believe that the person [regardless of how they make their living] trying to correct a misstatement has a GREATER right to set the record straight than other posters. Too often when a misstatement is made about a supplier on forums, the supplier either: * Is unaware the statement has been made and the statement ends-up standing as verity. � OR * Takes the conversation off-line and resolves the issue, but unfortunately, again the statement ends-up standing in the record of the forum.
Continuing on this point, I routinely email to suppliers links to postings so that they are aware of and can reply to posts that could affect their business [and we can get another view point].
When you say, I should be �very concerned that the information you are providing is at least accurate.� I�m not sure what �at least accurate� means. What else is there? Is there more than accurate? I try to do a good job of posting accurate information. I have posted things that were wrong. I have posted thing that were unclear. I have been corrected. I have apologized when I was wrong. There are things in the archives that I posted years ago that I would post differently today. If you don�t play the game, you never loose.
Regarding your �IMHO� comment, I believe everything posted on the internet is, by default, �IMHO� and prefacing each posting with it reduces bandwidth and content and plays to the lowest level that is so simple that they don�t realize that even the things supported by facts are open to interpretation and circumstance.
Don�t you understand that if every supplier searched the archives and posted address corrections to aged postings that the forum would no longer function? Don�t you understand that if someone cannot contact a supplier with incorrect information obtained from an aged posting that they will use other means to try to contact the supplier? And if that doesn�t work, they will post requesting current contact information. Don�t you understand that most users don�t even need contact information from the forum? They just need the name of a company and they use a search engine to find company contact information.
Listen, no one on this forum cares about WHO posts information. We just want information. None of us likes deleting all the Spam messages we get in our email. And it�s the same thing here. The complaint is: Please stop using the forum as an excuse to Spam us. Your defense of this cloaked Spam of: * �Oh, I just wanted to corrected the address� on this aged posting � OR � * �Thank you for mentioning our company name� on this aged posting
� seems na�ve. Or is there more to it than that?
Finally, please help me understand the "incorrect or blatantly false information about a supplier or one of their products� that the poster that started this conversation corrected with their posting, so that I don't do that again.
reply »