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Two classes of membership here?

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Paul Keith:
I was never here and there are always cops just as there are always cups.  :P

Renegade:
I was never here and there are always cops just as there are always cups.  :P
-Paul Keith (November 18, 2012, 07:23 PM)
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Hahahah~!

O U! :P

Nudel:
Have a look at the forum policy (you must accept before entering the forum) at the Directory "Opus" forum. Isn't it illogical to pretend your sw is the best of its kind, and then not allow any mentioning of competition sw's, when it should be of much interest rather often to discuss the respective realization of a feature in similar sw? (x2, XY and SC all permit this kind of discussion, and I own a paid license for any of those - not for DO, and that's not a coincidence: If you allow sw developers to treat you like s*** - delete the paragraph here -, they will never cease to do so, hence the interest of buying 3 competing products instead of just 1. And then, DO ist not THAT splendid, e.g. compare processing of metadata in x2 and DO.)-clean (November 17, 2012, 01:07 PM)
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I'm the Opus forum admin these days, and I take issue with this.

Here is the wording of the relevant part of our forum rules (which have not changed recently):

These forums are not for the discussion of other companies' products unless they are directly related to the usage of Directory Opus. You may post about products which other users will find useful in concert with Directory Opus (e.g. tools suitable for integration into Opus toolbar buttons). You may post about products you are having problems using alongside Directory Opus (e.g. if you need help figuring out how to make Opus and another program talk to each other). Most other mentions of third-party products will be considered off-topic and unacceptable.

The forums have a "Coffeeshop" area where rules are more relaxed and off-topic discussions are allowed provided they are not spam, abusive, illegal, etc.
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That rule is there so that people don't post questions about using Windows or Photoshop or whatever to our forum. They are there because people do it a lot, even with the rule there. (I imagine many people don't read the rules.)

People ask questions about general Windows usage and completely unrelated software on our forum because -- and they've said this themselves -- we tend to be better at answering questions than the support for the other software they were asking about.

I'm not saying we're better than the support for all other software, but we do engage with our users and spent a lot of time trying to help them. Some software authors don't even have support forums. Some have forums where posting is about as useful as firing your message into a black hole. (Ever had Microsoft or Adobe care that you're found a bug in their software, let alone actually fix it, let alone within several years of the report? We don't solve every problem, but some companies don't solve any problem, at least if you're Joe Public. So people sometimes come to us for those problems as well.)

People get used to us answering their questions and helping them, and forget that we are not a general "help you do anything with your computer" support forum. We sometimes answer those threads in our spare time but we obviously don't have the resources to do it all the time and for free, and we'd rather people went to whoever makes the software they bought to get support for it, rather than provide free support for someone else's software while whoever wrote it takes the money and ignores their users.

People can, and do, mention competing products on our forum. Where it's relevant we are fine with that. Where it's not relevant, and just someone having a cheap dig at us, it can be annoying. -- e.g. People fixate on a pet feature and say "program A does this so why doesn't Opus?" when that has little relationship to whether or not the feature is a good idea or a sensible use of our limited resources, and when there are a larger set of true statements of the form "Opus does this so why doesn't program A?" -- Even then, we don't generally do or say anything unless someone does it repeatedly and is basically trolling us and our forum.

And, as it says in the rules, we have an area where people can talk about more or less anything they want (as long as it's legal and decent).

We run a tech-support forum for Directory Opus, and the rule is just there to make it clear it isn't a tech-support forum for anything else.

clean:
Wiener, you left out the punitions part, where paying customers can be cut off from any help if they dare say something not finding your approval, e.g. praise a competing product or criticise yours.

Oh yeah, people coming to you with their Photoshop problems, I almost wet my pants. No sir, you simply apply all means at your disposal to hide the ugly fact that your product isn't superior to those you can buy combined without reaching the price of yours alone: x2, XY, SC. Do as you like, but don't take us for debrained imbeciles swallowing your claim (to put it in a friendly way instead of speaking plain English) you're afraid of simpletons mistaking you for an information bureau. That would be too insulting, Wiener.

(Sorry for the edit but the figure "swallowing" instead of "taking" was absolutely mandatory here.)

mouser:
Ok, I think that's enough of the negative insults, etc.  It's off topic and it's not appropriate for this forum.  Move on guys.

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