However I am new to the forum and you cannot send private messages until you've posted five time. So you look around the forums and you see people posting stuff like "#1, #2, etc. Each post though needs to be approved, so that policy means that the moderators have to be flooded with useless posts just so nOObs can get the ability to Private Message with Customer Service Representatives.
Who thought that up??
You're not seeing the deeper side of this. As a previous forum administrator myself, this is important to prevent spamming. Often times, some spammer will sign up and flood as many users as they can with spam messages. Those spam messages result in users being turned off from the forums and/or spamming the moderators and admins with complaints about spam... or starting threads about spam, which keep lurking visitors from signing up (if they think they are going to be pestered with junk via PM)
It also encourages others to become a part of the community. While I never saw posts with simple numbers to up the limit (unless mods took care of useless posts like that before I caught them) I can understand how that would be an annoying byproduct of the post minimum.
The approved post thing here at WPC is for
every new post from new users of course, not just the useless ones to up post count, so it's
not taking any more time for the mods to see those than to actually have to read through a legit post and decide if it's worthy (or whatever they do here to determine a good first few posts). Also, I'm taking the stance that the WPC forums are here for community involvement, and were not set up as a PM ground for customer service people to address complaints of users - which frankly I refuse to believe is happening in considerable volume and wouldn't be enough to cause concern. If entire companies have teams of people set up in forums (having worked for some capacity for Microsoft in the past, I can confirm they do this in some form - but everybody must know that by now) then they'll already have an established account they can regularly use to contact customers. What you may have been dealing with is customer service agents who regularly read the site but felt they needed to sign up to look into your situation or try to help in some way... not a cause for the WPC team to look into changing their policy on PMs... IMHO, of course. I don't speak for WPC in any capacity
Ending my off-topic reply... are you able to point us to your article, metalchick, or do the terms of your ghost writing agreement keep you from doing so? Because, well obviously, we'll then know who to attribute to the article
I would be interested in reading it, in any case. That will help to bring more light to this situation... John Legere seems to be quite involved and attuned to the community - one can only hope that articles, forum chatter, angry customer service calls, etc will alert him to a problem that he may not even know exists - or at least prompt him to get someone to change things who can. All we're asking for is a little transparency... things might change on a day-to-day basis when it comes to updates and operations, but it doesn't mean they can't publicly come out and tell us what they know. Now they're just getting bad PR for silently doing stuff in the background, and it looks like they don't support their devices. There are people in these forums saying they won't be getting the 925 because of the support T-Mobile has shown the 810... and I haven't recognized those users from being vocal in the 810 forums here (could be wrong). Either way - that's lost sales because of the bang-up job they've done with handling the 810... and apparently the missing 8X. Great to hear from some users that one or both of those phones can be in store, but that's likely because they still have stock or unfulfilled orders... if it's not on the website, it's no longer for sale. And if it is, such as it should be for the 8X, there needs to be an out of stock notice or something. Seriously, removing all Windows Phones from your lineup? I don't even see the 521 on there as a current or future device. And I only found the Lumia 925 sign-up page from a link that metalchick posted in the 925 forum... it's not advertised anywhere I can find on their site, unlike the iPhone which was
EVERYWHERE. They don't need to do a massive campaign for the 925, it's not as popular as the iPhone, but
at least give it some time in the news feed. sheesh. Along with the 521, while we're at it.
I don't care how low of sales they have on a device, that's no excuse from shutting out ANNOUNCED DEVICES from your carrier lineup. There are plenty of consumers who will want these devices and are seeing ads for them, or hearing about them from friends. I guess unless the aim is to try and steer them to the mighty iPhone (sorry metalchick) or the latest HTC or Samsung device. Well, the deal they struck with iPhone probably requires a minimum amount of iPhone sales and they took on a large amount of debt to do it... Sprint kind of got slaughtered after going into massive debt on the iPhone... so it wouldn't surprise me if T-Mobile starts quickly shuttering out devices that aren't their top ten sellers.
I'm very disappointed in T-Mobile.