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how do I delete a topic or question?
Users seem to manage to ask exact same question twice as if they hit submit button twice. How do I delete duplicate replies or whole topics?
I’m confused
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Inappropriate?Jure: We do sometimes see people double-posting. You can mark that as "Flag for review" and we'll delete the double post. In the course of my regular day, I usually spot those duplicates and weed them out, but flagging them removes them faster.
I’m hoping this helps
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Inappropriate?Will user be notified of this? I'm fine with marking things for review, but how do you actually know that it's a duplicate? I don't see an option for that in your dialog. Something like "Other" would seem better. I also hope the user does not get any negative points in the system for that.
I’m thankful
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Inappropriate?I review both posts to make sure I'm dealing with duplicates. If it is not, or if they differ very slightly (a sentence that is different, for example), I will contact the user and get permission to merge the two.
Good point. Perhaps we'll add "Other" to the list of choices. People usually mark duplicates as Inappropriate, but Other sounds like a good solution to me.
The users will definitely not get any negative points or anything like that. It's simply a gardening and weeding detail, and we wouldn't dream of penalizing someone for posting duplicate topics by accident.
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Inappropriate?That's a new detail - so I have to mark both topics?
Is this somewhere in a FAQ? I'd prefer to have a bit more control over this, some sort of administrative menu where at least I could clearly indicate these issues, even if it would require your affirmative action in the end. -
Inappropriate?You can mark one of the duplicates, or we will spot it and take care of it. We're working on company tools that will allow you to have a little bit more control, but we're also here to help with weeding like this, so feel free to ask me at any time if you have anything you want acted on ASAP. That's what I'm here for. Right now, the flagging process seems to work fairly well, but I will see if we can come up with something better. That may be a private messaging system, which is something we've considered.
1 person says
this answers the question
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Inappropriate?I would like the ability to have full control over the questions in my company topic. Can this please be added ASAP? If I feel that one is not appropriate, I would like to be able to delete it myself.
I’m undecided
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Inappropriate?sbosterdor: We don't generally delete content or allow company reps to delete content, but if the topic is inappropriate, spam, crass commercialism, etc., we can remove it. Can you point me to the topic in question?
I’m here to help
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Inappropriate?There is not one yet. We may need to pull our company from this service if we don't get that level of content control. That would be a bummer because your website looks great and all of the other features are awesome.
I’m frustrated
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Inappropriate?sboster: We're really into openness and transparency, and against censorship. We're creating a Switzerland for companies and customers, where they can trust that each one is coming to a level playing field. That may require companies to let go of some control and for customers to step outside the mindset of complaining and get into the mindset of being productive. You can read more about this in our Customer-Company Pact: http://www.ccpact.com/
I'll be sorry to see you go, but if you don't agree with our premise, I understand.
I’m for both companies and customers
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Inappropriate?I'm all for openness, also. My main concern is the speediness of action if someone posts profanities or if a competitor poisons the threads. Can you ensure me that these things will be dealt with right away?
I’m undecided
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Inappropriate?I can't promise that they'll be instantaneously removed. But, if inappropriate content is flagged by the company or customers, I can say that I'll take care of it almost immediately. This is assuming, of course, that it is spam or crass commercialism or something that violates our community guidelines: http://getsatisfaction.com/community_...
Our goal is to have as few rules as possible, especially since the definition of "objectionable content" can be very subjective. But that doesn't mean we don't have any rules or won't step in to help.
1 person says
this answers the question
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Inappropriate?@eric: While I agree with, embrace even, your principles of openness and transparency, as one of the voices of our company, Zenbe.com, it is most definitely *my* opinion about those principles that matters, not yours. If we want to censor and edit our users with Orwellian abandon and incur the resulting wrath, that is our decision, and we'll pay the consequences, not you.
Even for the most open and transparent companies, there are plenty of reasons to remove, edit, or redact content. Duplicate topics is the most benign example. We may need to update obsolete information, correct factual errors in announcements, remove sensitive information published by accident (by us or particularly resourceful users)... the list goes on.
The way I see it - and correct me if I have this wrong - GetSatisfaction is a specialized forum tool, little more. You are competing with literally dozens of other forum and blog products that we and other companies can choose from. While you might have the semi-interesting twist of offering forums for users to talk about a company before the company has joined your service, if the forum Amy created for us is any indication, this "twist" isn't attracting (m)any users. The reason being that until a company decides to endorse or "sanction" GetSatisfaction as their official forum and drive traffic to your site, you guys are just a 3rd wheel that hasn't been invited to the company<->user party. Thus, you end up being the only forum product out there that doesn't allow administrators to remove or edit topics(!)
Zenbe already has a thriving online community (http://forums.zenbe.com), but the free-form nature of BBPress is making it difficult to scale our ability to support our users. Thus GetSatisfaction looks like a great tool for us - I love the API and voting system, the widgets look cool, it's a clean interface - it solves a lot of the problems we're struggling with. I'd really like to recommend to our company that we adopt it. But any tool that comes with a built-in moderation system of, "Email Eric and he'll decide whether or not it conforms to his hand-wavy 'Switzerland' philosophy", is well... frankly, that's beyond ridiculous. :(
Bottom line, ability for administrators to remove and edit topics and comments (and pretty much all content) is a must-have.
I’m frustrated
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Inappropriate?Hi Robert,
You make some good points. Many companies do think of Get Satisfaction as a "specialized forum," and have adopted it as their customer community with that notion in mind. We're happy that they get value out of it in this narrow frame, and certainly want to be supportive in their use.
Our ambitions are much larger than that, however. We did not create Get Satisfaction to provide an incrementally better forum system. In fact, we are united in our dislike for forums, a discussion format that is unquestionably long in the tooth.
Rather, we built Get Satisfaction to foster more productive and positive customer-company relationships. In developing it, we were influenced by the full range of online communication channels, from email to social networks to blogs. More importantly, it's our central thesis that the big problem with conventional customer support is that the context itself breeds contempt, since it assumes that companies "own" the customer relationship. The mistrust this approach has bred is infamous--just check out the Consumerist for a daily sampling of the results.
Our goal isn't to merely create a more elegant product, but to cultivate a shared ownership of the relationship. We think this is the key for companies to reduce support costs by increasing customer engagement. Your proposed idea of one-way, unchecked corporate censorship is at odds with our mission, and--I think--the interests of companies themselves. You're absolutely right that it's up to each company to decide how transparent it wishes to be. Its adoption of Get Satisfaction, consequently, is a public commitment to the ideals of candor and accountability with their customers.
Having said all that, we do plan to increasingly distribute "moderation" abilities to companies and trusted consumers throughout the system. We know that the most invested participants are the ones most able to make the judgements about what is appropriate behavior in the community. We'll roll such features carefully to ensure we preserve the values we've built our business on. For now, our flagging system will suffice, and you might consider our full-time community management a service rather than a hindrance.
P.S. Your company was originally added to Get Satisfaction by another member of your team, not Amy. That is just a welcome message from her.
I’m serene
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Inappropriate?Thor, thanks for the timely and well thought out reply. It's obvious that GetSatisfaction strives to be more than "yet another forum tool". The feature set and vision are evident, and I'll be the first to commend you for that.
I'll also be the first to agree that the notion of a company "owning" their customers is outdated and dysfunctional. That's certainly not how we view our users. But there are cases where having the ability to moderate and censor forum content in a timely fashion is critical. For example, go into iTunes, type "Zenbe", and then click on the one result you'll get to open the detail page for "Zenbe Lists. If you look at the user reviews, you'll see that the first two reviews are damningly negative ones. They also happen to 100% incorrect (they are out-of-context quotes from an old Terms of Service that we corrected within hours after realizing there was a problem). But users believe them to be true and are marking them as "helpful" in breathtaking numbers, which keeps them at the top of the list of reviews.
This is a situation that I expect any sane person would say warrants some sort of editorial intervention. But because we have to rely on a moderation system that is (dys)functionally identical to what GetSatisfaction offers, and because Apple is overwhelmed by support requests from other developers, we are left with no recourse.
In this case, we have no avenue to resort to because Apple, well, they're Apple and they hold the keys to the iPhone kingdom. But when it comes to _our_ community, we do get to decide what forums to adopt and sanction as the official arena in which we communicate. You can rest assured, in no uncertain terms, that we won't make this same mistake twice. As I said before, I'd love to migrate us over to your service, but given what we're currently going through with Apple, this issue may prove to be a deal breaker.
I don't say that to apply pressure to you. You guys have a free product and are free to pick and chose it's features and direction. (Actually, it always seems a bit absurd when a user says, "we have to have this feature or else".) I just thought you'd appreciate an outside perspective, one that may or may not align with other companies you're dealing with.
Finally, a quick, "oops", for saying Amy created our forum. That was just (yet another) communication breakdown on our side of things. (Sorry, Amy!). If only I could edit my previous post... -
Inappropriate?Hi Robert,
Thanks for offering your thoughts on GetSatisfaction! I'm sure Thor will have some further comments, but I wanted to step in with my opinions as well.
Regarding your example about iTunes: The failure there is not in the lack of moderation, it is that apple has restricted your ability to respond. You don't have that problem with GSFN. If such a review were to be posted on Get Satisfaction, you could respond when you made the fix and feature its answer at the top of the topic. It would then show up in the search results as "Solved".
Outside of Spam and blatant abuse, I've not been shown any reason for deleting or editing history that couldn't be better served by conversation. Get Satisfaction can be better about surfacing updates and changes (such as marking a topic as duplicate and providing navigation to the canonical topic), but I don't think censorship is the solution. -
Inappropriate?I have to agree 100% with Scott's assessment of the breakdown in the iTunes example. I also agree with how that same situation would play out in the context of Get Satisfaction.
Robert, I thank you for continuing *this* conversation, and I hope that we've been able to show you that a suitable alternative to censorship and absolute control is a viable option. Censorship also has a nasty tendency to be noticed by your most astute users, and used as ammunition against you. -
Inappropriate?I suspect we both understand where the other is coming from at this point. Censorship is a double-edged sword, no doubt, but as a company it's really nice to have control over which side of that sword gets used, rather than handing control over the sword to someone unfamiliar with you, your product, or your users. In the Apple scenario we would ideally replace them with a "obsolete TOS quote removed", but I'd happily settle for deleting them outright with no explanation. Would I take a good hard look at why I'm doing it and what affect it has on the trust of our users? You bet. A couple users might notice, they might even say something about it on iTunes. But weigh that against the 1000's of bad impressions those reviews have created... it's a no-brainer decision.
Scott, we have essentially implemented the solution you propose on iTunes, "featuring the answer at the top of the topic". Check out our app description - the first paragraph is, (paraphrased) "Hey, we've fixed this!" The results? Negligible. Over 200 users have marked these incorrect reviews as, "helpful", since we added that to the description. Realistically, probably all we've done is call more attention to those reviews. :P Sometimes you really do need a simple "delete" button.
I’m overflowing with boundless glee at the possibilities
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This answers the question
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Scott was actually talking about the Get Satisfaction feature of promoting a reply from the company to the spot directly under a topic, as the "first response." That's not a feature iTunes offers, but something that Get Satisfaction does. -
Inappropriate?[Bleepity bleep bleep!] Who do I submit moderation requests to? I need to change "ideally replace them" to "ideally replace the reviews" in my previous post. (And, no, I didn't do that on purpose just to prove a point. It's an honest mistake.)
I’m amused
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Inappropriate?Robert, the way it works is that you can edit your topic for fifteen minut
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