Decommissioning Of Forums!
Hi @PIAJayson!
While I understand the security concerns, this forum allows users to also interact and transfer knowledge with others. Removing this is a HUGE mistake (imho) for PIA. Rather than removing it, if you have security concerns, then properly shore them up! You don't destroy a house because you have a leaky roof - you FIX the roof.
The lack of a discussion forum, to me, also removes a significant level of transparency. I'm only 6 months into a 2yr contract, but the complete removal of a discussion forum IS enough for me to change VPN providers.
Just allowing comments on Announcements is utterly insufficient!
While I understand the security concerns, this forum allows users to also interact and transfer knowledge with others. Removing this is a HUGE mistake (imho) for PIA. Rather than removing it, if you have security concerns, then properly shore them up! You don't destroy a house because you have a leaky roof - you FIX the roof.
The lack of a discussion forum, to me, also removes a significant level of transparency. I'm only 6 months into a 2yr contract, but the complete removal of a discussion forum IS enough for me to change VPN providers.
Just allowing comments on Announcements is utterly insufficient!
Comments
As Jayson previously noted, many of our users were using the forums as a way to submit account issues, which we would have to ultimately ask these users to submit a ticket anyway, as someones email address, or account username should not be transparent and be kept in confidentiality. Also, as Jayson noted we would be keeping a large part of the user material submitted for future reference by our users. Any new community forum posts should be conducted at the subreddit aforementioned.
That is not indicative of a company I want to support. IMHO, the vast majority of Reddit is *garbage*. Because *your* personnel cannot setup a *secure* forum and simply respond appropriately those posts that should be support requests, you disregard the rest of us.
I'm calling BS on this one. Simply a LAME cop-out.
And that is directed right at MANAGEMENT (or lack thereof), not the support personnel that have been very responsive here.
I don't know who's calling the shots at LTM, but I've said it before and I repeat it again, management SUCKS - your project/program management has shown considerable incompetency and a complete lack of leadership. Andrew Lee can make all the blogs and posts he wants, but when the rest of his personnel screw things up for the company, it's all wasted breath.
It's not hard to see what's coming next. For the sake of "transparency," how long will it be before you also decommission the Private Internet Access subreddit?
We want to consolidate our resources to the Helpdesk as it allows us much greater control and response. As I previously stated, we're having to currently split our team in order to deal with the many sources of support request.
Furthermore as I stated, their are a number of security concerns regarding our forum software and the response time to security reports to the development team responsible. We can either fix the roof as per your analogy or we can concentrate on improving our software and our features. Whilst the forum does serve a purpose, it also causes a number of other issues.
We respect your opinion and welcome your feedback. We made the announcement as we have learned from previous changes where we did not announce in time and just made the changes required. Whilst I understand the change may be scary, this is the choice we have opted to take and we have detailed the timeline involved.
Just to note any ticket I have sent to PIA has had a reply in under 24 hours I think a lot of the time people are using garbage email providers that don't always receive emails.
I am not a Reddit user nor do I desire to be one. Social media is way out of hand. There are too many SM sites and each one sells data to help with revenue. That is the way it works. Plus the ad revenue. But since I run AdBlock I do not see any ads anyway.
Sorry to see the forum go, but that is the way of technology. Why do it for yourself when you can have someone else do it.
On a more serious note, I like forums and I dislike 3rd parties.
Russ
I also post on Reddit important announcements where appropriate.
@Westie : I apologise, I did not deliberately evade your question. We will decommission the PIA Subreddit when it is no longer fit for purpose. Currently the Subreddit fulfils a range of duties, so the TLDR reason would simply be:
At this time, it is not currently planned to decommission the subreddit. The subreddit is integrated into our Support Platform which means a ticket is automatically created when a new post is submitted.
So what exactly does decommissioning entail? Will the forums be deleted or made inaccessible? Or will it just mean that no new posts can be made here by members? My hope is the latter and not the former. There are a great many very useful posts here that have helped me out a lot in solving problems I've experienced. If they've helped me I'm sure they've also helped many others too. I hope forum content will all just be archived here in perpetuity.
BTW the search function here is very useful, something that I haven't found available in Reddit. So I don't think Reddit will be a very useful replacement. On the other hand I've also seen a lot of spam here too, something that I'm sure must get very tiresome for mods. Does Reddit handle spam any better?
This will allow us to reference the useful material and migrate it to the Helpdesk. This is why I stated that anyone who wrote a useful guide will receive credit. I believe that recognition of a persons contribution to the community is important. We will be taking all useful and important guides, scripts and such to the Helpdesk.
The forum is not going to disappear overnight.... however after 3 months we will remove the forum completely.
In response to your other question: Reddit handles spam significantly better.
Sorry but I beg to differ Jayson. I raised a ticket and after 2 weeks I gave up and posted on these forums. Then I was promised by PIA KYJelly that it would be done but then he and all PIA proceeded to ignore every other posting, and here we are 3 years later and it's is still outstanding and it was just a simple request for the PIA win App to create a text file via with the forwarded port in the PIA on every connection so it would allow programmable access to the forward port to be used in other applications etc. A simple procedure of create file, write port number, close file yet it was just so difficult of PIA to accomplish. Maybe once you release the source code onto github, then none clever folk can make the changes.
Also, the request of getting the PIA Win app to run from a fixed location was also a job too difficult for PIA to fathom out, so there are 2 nice guides on these forums but none of which appear in the shiny polished new Guides section, and surprisingly the boogy security man of PIA who said "No, it's a security risk to run the PIA from a fixed location" does not bother to post now that he has been shown to provide usless security advice.
For example in
Open Source: Releasing the PIA iOS Client
What date did you post this, can you tell me by just reading the article from this linkhttps://www.privateinternetaccess.com/helpdesk/news/posts/open-source-releasing-the-pia-ios-client
Don't get me wrong, I love PIA and have used it for 6 years approx, it's just the support side is flaky.
Sorry but I beg to differ Jayson. I raised a ticket and after 2 weeks I gave up and posted on these forums. Then I was promised by PIA KYJelly that it would be done but then he and all PIA proceeded to ignore every other posting, and here we are 3 years later and it's is still outstanding.
I was not aware of this situation. I joined PIA in May 2016 when we had our previous (outsourced) Support department. This isn't something that I would think is acceptable. Sadly I cannot see what happened within our Support system 3 years ago. That said, I believe in solutions not problems....
If you'd please be willing to email me at [email protected] and mark the ticket as "FAO Jayson", I would love to speak to you privately in order to resolve the issue, especially as you stayed with PIA even after a negative experience. That I think speaks volumes about what you think of the technical service irrelevant of the support you received.
Regarding the date in the news articles: Valid point. I can easily resolve that by adding the date.