Big Brother is watching

A FUNNY THING can happen when a company tries to mute criticism from customers. Sometimes it only focuses all the more attention on the negative comments the company wanted to suppress.

In late January a number of Paradox customers began writing The Gripe Line about changes Corel had made to Paradox support newsgroups it hosts. “This newsgroup is an extremely valuable resource in terms of users helping other users,” wrote one reader. “It was down all last week; we were told [it was] due to ‘technical difficulties.’ But when it finally came back up, suddenly they now have moderators who are reading everything before it’s posted and censoring all messages that are even slightly critical of Corel.”

Although the change from open to moderated was made for all the Corel support newsgroups, users were given the impression by Corel staff that the move was aimed at the Paradox newsgroups specifically, and in fact had been triggered by one specific posting there that everyone could agree was unduly offensive. “Cutting out vulgar words, pornography, and libelous statements are one thing. Blocking complaints about the company and its software are another,” wrote another reader.

Even those who had some sympathy for Corel’s desire to silence its most malignant detractors were upset about the time moderators took to post the messages they did approve. “Although I can accept that Corel may wish to limit profane and inflammatory criticism, even to the point of deleting such messages, I suggest that the moderators’ delays on message posts greatly reduce the effectiveness of newsgroup correspondence,” wrote another reader. “The cost in message delay and in defecting outraged customers will be huge compared to the cost that a now-paranoid Corel might suffer due to criticism from a few overly excited customers. Of course, the current newsgroup policies are inflaming further resentment and public criticism, and overly zealous censoring by Corel will simply drive the discussions to other newsgroups that Corel cannot censor.”

Corel officials say that critical comments about the company are still permissible in the support newsgroups and the only messages being censored are those that violate its guidelines on obscenity, spam, or personal attacks. Although a particular message attacking several Corel employees by name was the final straw, Corel had already been planning the move to moderated groups due to large amounts of spam the newsgroups were receiving. And, they point out, Corel is hardly the only company that moderates the newsgroups it hosts.

“All of our newsgroups, including Paradox, are designed to provide a useful peer-to-peer community to discuss our software,” says a Corel representative. “Through moderation, we are able to ensure that the information in our newsgroups is appropriate and relevant to the community. Our customers are in a secure environment where they are able to find the product information they are looking for. We apologize to those customers who may have experienced delays when we first introduced our moderated newsgroups. We have worked diligently to fix these problems. The overwhelming majority of user comments are posted in real time. While the moderation may be a little more work, we think the benefits to our customers are well worth it.”

The Paradox users, including many whose loyalty to the products goes back to the days when Borland owned it, question Corel’s claims. They acknowledge that there has been some recent improvement in the lag time it takes for posts to appear, but they think that’s partly because much of the Paradox traffic has moved to newsgroups on public servers. Censorship of even mildly critical comments continues, readers say, and they believe posts are being filtered out automatically because they contain certain words like “censorship” or the names of Corel officials. One reader who for a time thought his posts had been completely banned discovered he could still get uncritical comments past just by removing the word president from his signature file. “Is that thin-skinned or what?” he wrote.

At this point, the question of whether Corel is or is not blocking discouraging words is almost moot. The fact that newsgroup participants largely believe the company is censoring their posts in itself reduces the value of the newsgroup for Corel’s users.

Corel certainly has the right to moderate its hosted newsgroups if that’s what it wants to do.

But Paradox users don’t believe it’s really in Corel’s own interest to do so. No matter how efficiently and fairly done, moderating the newsgroups will necessitate some delays and some additional costs. And by making the peer-to-peer communication less direct, it encourages customers to at least consider using public newsgroups instead, threatening to dilute the critical mass of Paradox-savvy customers participating in the newsgroups. Without moderators, Corel could still enforce its guidelines by removing offending posts that are brought to its attention, and automatic filters could eliminate at least the worst of the spam. So why should Corel spend more money to run a service that customers will value less?

Even if some of Corel’s harsher critics are correct in their belief that the company sees no future for Paradox, it’s still hard for me to see how this move is anything but shortsighted. The last thing Corel should want to do is to draw attention to what its most disgruntled customers are saying. But that’s exactly what trying to muzzle your critics will do.