Goognight Vodafone UK Forum

So the 1st April brings to an end the only official support forum for Vodafone UK. While I admit it wasn't exactly busy it did prove to be a valuable resource and first call port of call for Vodafone users.
The only options now are Facebook and Twitter, where responses can take more than 2hrs meaning a lot of resolutions take a few days, if at all.
I'll miss my fellow members - all good things must come to an end.

This explains why getting a 404 error.

It really is a shame that they closed the forum, it was invaluable to me when I was setting up my own router and wanted to check compatibility and connection details.

It seems strange that they'd no longer want to let users help each other - if they didn't want to monitor it anymore then they could've easily left it up and still let members give each other assistance, even without Vodafone agents active on there.

Honestly, once my contract is over next April, I think I'll be moving to a different CityFibre provider, there's plenty of them to choose from!

(It's also a shame that Vodafone don't let you easily see what your early termination fee would be if you wanted to change now, just ambiguous guidance on "taking off any cost savings" from the total cost of the remaining contract)

WOW seriously!

I wish I had got my Mum to connect to Zen Internet. She would have been better off. VF don't offer any voicemail service but Zen do, and Zen offer better support.

Why on earth would any organisation close a support forum, oh and forgot to update their website to remove the option to select it!

In reply to a post by CJT:

Why on earth would any organisation close a support forum, oh and forgot to update their website to remove the option to select it!

One reason might be that it stops customers sharing examples of Vodafone closing compalaints as resolved when the customer has not settled. That's what they have just done with us. And I tried to access the forum becuase searches show other people had posted about similar. It is AIUI not just bad customer service but a breach of Ofcom's requirements. It falsifies their their statistics on complaints closed within 8 weeks.

Wow that’s bad!

Can you report them to Ofcom?

I think also to save cost on maintaining forum moderators and administrators. You see, you have to pay salary to maintain these Mods to look after the forum. There are also technical problems that need to be resolved within the forum site itself.

I remember a few years ago Community Fibre also had their own dedicated forums and it was shown as a button on their website. They removed it.

The same I saw happen with game forums like Gameloft mobile and also Ubisoft. I had the very same username as here registered on Ubisoft in 2003 with lots of posts! Once upon a time I also had over 10K posts in the EA UK Community Forums and they also retired those and I lost all of it! Same with Square Enix 2005 Tomb Raider and Just Cause series it disappeared and then got revamped and then disappeared again.

I think in many industries they like to not have to include official forums to save money! For example, there may be conflicts and users insulting one another and that requires moderation. Vodafone has to pay to hire moderators to moderate these comments. This isn't free and it has an impact on the prices of the broadband packages.

I think ISPs that have their official dedicated forums tend to have more expensive packages than those that don't have them included!

This is why you see mostly none of the Altnets who offer cheap price packages have a dedicated forum! I guess, the best is to use an unofficial sub forum for discussion like in this forum or ISPReview. In some respects this is more convenient as you don't have to deal with many separate forum accounts.

In reply to a post by CJT:

Wow that’s bad!

Can you report them to Ofcom?

Yes and no. AIUI we can report them but Ofcom won't act on individual complaints. But we are not letting it pass. We are retired civil servants in the habit of making contemporaneous notes and sending emails to record what has been agreed. And with the time to chase them to CISAS. May work in things like Vodafone claiming they can't carry out One Touch Switch & number porting from Virgin Media.

Thanks for posting this - I'd been searching for a few things recently and Google keeps coming back with forum.vodafone.co.uk results but I could never access them - now I know why! Such a shame they shut them down as quite a few of the technical topics look pretty useful!

Hoping that you will continue to offer your excellent experience on this forum

Ofcom don't regulate individual providers own websites, so there's nothing to "report" to them.

Having said that, community fora often provider user-user support and this can save many queries from needing formal/official CS.

Hey Ripshod,

I thought I'd add some context as I was a mod from the vf forums and I do remember you. The forums were moderated by some additional responsibility staff from the social media team. At the end of march the entire UK social media team were made redundant. The social media side of the job was outsourced to south africa, I guess they didn't want to continue the support.

In reply to a post by orionstar:

the entire UK social media team were made redundant. The social media side of the job was outsourced

I'm really sorry to hear of these redundancies, nothing worse than to lose your job to oversea people who are typically less capable of doing your job.

I wonder if this is the same group who have been doing TT's?

Post deleted by Ripshod

In reply to a post by orionstar:

Hey Ripshod,

I thought I'd add some context as I was a mod from the vf forums and I do remember you. The forums were moderated by some additional responsibility staff from the social media team. At the end of march the entire UK social media team were made redundant. The social media side of the job was outsourced to south africa, I guess they didn't want to continue the support.

Unfortunately, it seems this is the natural way of things. For years we had been struggling with language and knowledge barriers dealing with 1st line support (outsourced to Egypt at the time). But I'm not going to complain, the prices are still low and should remain so for a few years yet.
The recent merger with Three may bring back some normality, though I won't be holding my breath.
All the best with all your future endeavours.