"Petition" is a banned word on the Dell forums

as77 · 09-07-04, 04:54 PM

Try to enter a post on the Dell Community forums that contains the word "petition". You will get this message:

"Message Body: Message body contains invalid content. Please do not use profanity in your post. Profanity is not tolerated on these boards. (Word: petition)"

09-07-04, 05:08 PM

-jcll2002

09-07-04, 05:09 PM

that is pathetic. but then again they have had there fair share of members wanting to petition. i.e. support for wm2k3, and s.e. that $73 x3 goof a while back among many other things, im sure

as77 · 09-07-04, 05:18 PM

Probably they introduced this ban when some people started online petitions on other web sites and they linked those other sites. Dell disliked that very much.

But why would a company want to suppress petitions by customers? I would think petitions are good indicators of market demand and generally they provide information on what the customers want. But Dell obviously thought that it was bad publicity and they tried to minimize the number of people joining petitions, even by suppressing information on where those petitions can be found.

joelw135 · 09-08-04, 11:41 AM

Take a look at this, it has reached CNet.CNet Wrote

MrKlaatu · 09-08-04, 12:01 PM

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as77.......you could always misspell it!

pat!t!0n
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as77 · 09-08-04, 12:38 PM

Hmmm... a comment says that HP censored their support forums in order to suppress the petition. Dell did something like that, too. They changed the forum settings so that the threads were sorted by the date of the first post instead of the date of the latest post by default. This way, the petition thread never showed up on the first page, users had to dig for it.

Do you guys think that Dell-Rollie's bosses intentionally gave him false information about the SE upgrade, in order to stop the petition? (The petition thread was locked after Rollie announced that an upgrade to SE will be provided.)

joelw135 · 09-08-04, 12:44 PM

Well that fact was agreed to a long time ago, that Dell basically censored the forum by changing the method in there forum how we see posts. All posts are not moved to the front when new post appear. They stay where they were 10 pages buried.

as77 · 09-08-04, 01:40 PM

I just learned that lawsuit is also a banned word on the Dell forums.

And, they deleted the entire petition thread (it contained about 43 pages of messages, people asking for an SE upgrade).

MichaelX30 · 09-08-04, 08:26 PM

hmm... we should make a petition for a X30 trade in for the X50...!!!...

sparkyguy · 10-08-04, 12:12 AM

A relative newbie, so maybe a naive question, but: Lots of Axim users come here. Couldn't there be a petition here?

10-08-04, 01:35 AM

There should be a link to the petition here or is it against board rules.

10-08-04, 05:10 AM

Does Dell's forum matter? Do a lot of people actually use it?

I once killed a forum. Ansyr's, on CEWindows, long before I was asked to moderate. It wasn't that I wanted to kill it, truly, but whenever I saw some poor soul who'd shelled out $50 for the horrid 'Primer' PDF viewer as I had, complaining of one of the many problems with the software, I just had to comment. So happens that my comments usually, or maybe always, linked to the free Adobe reader, a better product by far, and free. It took a few months, and Ansyr deleted quite a few of my posts (developers have moderator powers there, and Chris De Herrera, CEWindows' owner, was not aware of these abuses of that privilege), but eventually withdrew, as it was too embarrassing and probably hurt sales, a lot.

I'd suggest posting heavily on Dell's forum. Be polite, never confrontational, always honest. Embarrass them. Something might happen.

As for the upgrade of my X5 to WM2003, I looked around with Google for a few hours and tried to read Russian, German, Chinese... then found a perfect kit in Idaho. And no, I'll not be posting a link here nor offering one, which would contravene forum rules to which I agreed in joining Aximsite. I downloaded it over Wi-Fi (about 50MB compressed to a 30MB ZIP) onto the X5's SD card using EZDowrloader, dumped it to the PC, and an hour later was hunting down '03 versions of all my software. Search engines rock when OEMs don't bother to support users, as in the case with Dell's withdrawal of the upgrade. Illegal? Probably. Immoral? Nah. Dell's not selling it, except in the UK, to locals only. So no loss to them, unless one considers sales strategies of nefarious sorts to be something to honour. I'll not buy a new Dell just to get a minor OS upgrade, one which should cost $30. I'll also not send Dell $30 now. At my usual billing rate of $40 per hour, they owe me a bit for wasted time. I'll forgive that. WM2003 is nice!