This Community Forum

[videosoul]

@Peter_SUK @Peter_S. I've just registered with this forum to discover that none of my rankings, profile informtion, kudos etc have been transferred over from the Sony USA based Sony Community Forum. I had a very high ranking there.

This is rather dissapointing.

I thought the whole point of the new single-sign-on was to make things like this eaier? Now I have one Sony login, but two seperate forum identities. That's a bit silly, isn't it?

[IamNic]

Hi @videosoul,

Sony Europe and Sony US are two different branches of the Sony company.

I assume you can't access your US-Community Account anymore, since their new platform checks for the region you are accessing the site from.

Same happended to me - read here: https://www.reddit.com/r/sony/comments/8a0p02/the_sony_us_community_seems_to_have_been_ported/

That is quite disappointing but unless Sony US gets rid of the region lock you sadly can't access the account anymore.

You are not the only one and I hope they notice that and make it possible to access the accounts from other parts of the globe soon.

- Nic

[videosoul]

Yeah, I know they're seperate. But this is madness.

It's particularly frustrating as I on numerous occassions gave feedback (and was invited in to give feedback) about the forum, and I always said "make it international... you have customers from around the world wanting to access the same resources". They've now gone and done the exact opposite.

This is utterly infruriating.

To make it worse, the most active part (based on post count) of the previous US Sony Community Forum was the Digital Cinema Camera section (FS7, F5, F55)... and it seems like ALL of those posts have vanished with this refresh. Thats a HUGE wealth of regularly accessed information which is now gone.

[IamNic]

Hi @videosoul,

I still hope that most of the posts are just stuck in limbo and will re-appear after a few days/weeks.

Other "hot-topics" have vanished as well, so I think it is not too far fetched, that these posts are not actually gone.

Additionally I try to get in contact with someone in charge to stop the region-check so you (and everyone else affected) can access their accounts again.

- Nic

[videosoul]

Let's hope so!

I will be contacting someone about this too.

It seems daft that I can login to all the other sections of the Sony sites with one username and password, but suddenly have two forum accounts (one of which I can't access)!

This really is so silly... the same conversations will end up happening in two places. If a user has some important information to share they will need to post it twice to ensure it is seen!

[PaulReam]

I'm in the same position... after all the time and effort I put into trying to help the community, it's a bit of a kick in the teeth to loose all that knowledge we collectively gained.

[PaulReam]

I can only presume that Sony don't want European customers to talk to US customers... maybe the huge difference in the way support and service is applied was causing them problems?  Killing the professional community like this can't be an accident.  

[IamNic]

Hi @PaulReam,

from my experience the moderators at the US Sony Community never wanted any type of discussion.

Many times they locked posts which were created for such a purpose.

The reason for that is simple - the US community is not a community like the European Sony Communities are, yet plain support forums.

They want you to ask a question - get your answer and then be done with it.

That also explains why they don't want anyone from outside the US/Canada/Asia Pacific and Latin America to post on their forums:

They want to keep the post volume low/lower to take off some pressure of their support agents.

That is a very, very bad decision in my eyes.

Also something went wrong when porting their community to the new platform, since the URLs of the old posts don't match the same posts on the new platform.

Not only do Google search results lead to the "force.com" error-page, but also the links people put in posts on other forums or in their YouTube videos description.

That is a major **** ** if you ask me, since so much information is now lost or inaccessable.

My only hope is, that this is just temporarily and not permanent, since this would be a disaster beyond all expectations.

- Nic

[Peter_S.]

Hi videosoul,

Sorry for my late reply.

I understand your frustration but unfortunately there's not much we can do.

Since both communities were never connected in the past there have been two completely separate set-ups and databases that unfortunately cannot be combined.

Sorry for the bad news

Cheers

Peter

[videosoul]

Hi @Peter_S.,

Thank you for your reply. However I feel yu've partially misunderstood.

Our issue isn't so much to do with combining the two forums, it is as follows:

1. We (Europeans) are now locked out of the USA forum. As such, we have no way of airing our concerns to their team. That is why we are now here.

2. All the previous professional broadcast/digital cinema conversations (a very large wealth of fantastic information) have apparently been totally removed.

3. The fact that each region has it's own forum is nonsense: it means conversations get duplicated and users from one region (community) cannot engage and help users in another region (community). It seems crazy to call a digital platform a community if is region locked: by definition the internet (world wide wibe) is international. As is the Sony user base.

An example: say I have a serios issue with my Sony camera in the UK, i might look to this forum for help. However, I don't find the help I am looking for, because no one else in the Europe has experienced this issue. However, in the USA, lots of people have had the issue, and have been sharing solutons with the exact same camera. Becasue I am locked out of the USA forum I am excluded from finding the help I need.

Do you understand why that doesn't make any sense from a customer perspective?

4. It's clear that this forum and the new USA one are very consumer product focused. What concerns us, is that with the launch of the new "pro.sony" website, there seems to be no "professional" community area anymore. Fine - we all chat on Facebook etc anyway... but what about the many years worth of valuable content that has no been lost?

@PaulReam do they not realise we all chat on Facebook too anyway?