This is absolutely terrible

make me feel like I've landed at the Fisher-Price site by accident

What, you don't care for the Facebook atomosphere? I don't think it was an accident (unfortunately).

You forgot to mention the "like" button under every post.....

The new features including the overall look-and-feel probably didn't originate with Apple. The new forum is apparently a Jive commercial product, as was the old one. Take a look at Jive's current home page:

http://www.jivesoftware.com

It includes:

Welcome to the new way.

Technology is no longer a barrier in our personal lives. So why is it in our work lives? Jive is on a singular mission to transform the way we work. Our Social Business Software is the only true enterprise–scale solution on the market that lets you engage employees, customers and the social web.

We integrate the best features of social networking, collaboration software, community software, and social media monitoring to extend a layer of social capabilities across every level of your business. Enabling you to produce massive business results.

Hmm...

Jive has an product called "Jive SBS 4" which is similar to the current Apple Support Communities, though some features are different. There's documentation for it here:

http://docs.jivesoftware.com/jive_sbs/4.0/topic/com.jivesoftware.help.sbs.online _4.0.1/user/UsingtheApplication.html

As for the Jive commercial software, knowing what it is doesn't explain why Apple chose it. Benefit of the doubt: could be it was Apple's only option or the least bad of the bad and required an awful moment of nose holding when the decision was made (one hopes.) If they had other, better choices, and they want it like this, then this beggars belief.

It's even hard to understand why any large business would want it for effective intra-business communication, cumbersome as it is.

Yup, I agree.

It seems to me that Apple's staff is gradually going the downhill path of all BIG and successful businesses: Lethargic, absentminded and introverted staff, focus on the weekend and their personal hobbies, loss of joy for coming to work, etc. You probably will be able to extend this list of disappointing observations. It probably is a corollary of Murphy's Law: If you get too big it's impossible to remain nimble. RPH

Apple chose it because it's the only software that can handle the massive load all we users put on the forums. The only competitor, WebCrossing, ran the previous incarnation of the Apple Discussions and was abandoned because it couldn't keep up even back then. I don't how Apple feels about Jive, but they really didn't have any alternative.

Regards.

Rudolf, you are totally wrong in your analysis, at least as far as it applies to the Communities. I have met several of the people who work on the Communities and they are all passionate and hard-working to a fault. You do a disservice, and even offer insult, to people about whom you know nothing, and I think an apology is called for.

I agree with Dave Sawyer 100%.

Please understand that the massive amount of traffic discussions.apple.com handles & the vast database of messages it contains leave the ASC team with no viable alternative besides using Jive to power it.

Jive is not an Apple product. The Jive software previously used to run the site was an older product the company no longer supports & it too was rapidly becoming incapable of supporting the ever increasing load of this site. If nothing had been done, the site would soon become completely unusable, in a sense a victim of its own success.

The new version of the product is enough different from the old one that the team could not simply install it & let it seamlessly take over running the site. It took months of hard work to design templates, set up & test new operating parameters, add new metadata to many millions of old items, & so on before it could be taken online publicly. And even after that, there is still a huge amount of ongoing work to eliminate bugs, optimize the servers, & other behind the scenes stuff before the team can relax.

Yea, which is useless without a dislike button.

Why do we have to have all this politically correct unreality features?

Like and dislike, or no button at all.

I am very sorry to have hurt someone's feelings. My comment was not meant as criticism of anybody individual but an observation about the typical path of large organizations and after reflecting on some of the unhappy comments by other users. And in no way did I have the Communities in mind. As a matter of fact I find the experience with Communities extremely helpful and quite positive.

Rudolf