Any forum user can troll you very effective within 5 Minutes and it takes you hours and days to rectify. IF people will believe you.
You can read, but don’t you ever write.
Reasons: the discussion culture of the internet, and those of fora, the typical forum audience, the fact that opinions very often replace knowledge and experience, and the oftentimes total lack of manners by those who feel entitled to express their anger and frustration, at the cost of others.
Some moderated fora such as this one manage some of these issues, like this forum, but not all. In the end, as a manufacturer, I’ll be better off to employ good sales personnel with a well organized client feedback process, along with dedicated industry meetings, and workshops.
A moderated forum such as EuroGA is however very different to the usual GA forums where there is more or less total anarchy and only obviously legally dodgy stuff gets removed.
Meetings and workshops are indeed effective events because you get a receptive audience. However you still need to find a way to get people to turn up at the meetings or workshops…
And you need to allocate competent people to do the presentation – because the audience might be asking some pretty direct questions, right there in the room. Those people are usually not around in Europe. The big avionics names have them in the US, obviously. Here in Europe, they cannot even bring smart people to Aero Friedrichshafen, in most cases… and that is by far the biggest event going.
EuroGA has been contacted by avionics manufacturers in the past regarding doing a presentation at some of our fly-ins, but I never wanted to turn a fly-in into some commercial event, and in any case the contact never got back in touch with details of what they proposed.
It is almost universally good advice to never mention anything posted in a pilot forum to a maintenance company.
Even a totally polite mention can result in this which wipes that company off the map for you and probably others. I am not sure why this “personality type” is so prevalent but I have noticed that most of them come from the same ex military background.
However, it is also the case that a mention of any regulation (which conflicts with what the shop has told you) is likely to result in you being shown the door. This is equally the case in flight training and a discussion of what previous experience is acceptable, required, etc.
I may have posted this one before – a UK shop, after mentioning a EuroGA thread on the dubious practice of applying stickers to backs of instruments
Any forum user can troll you very effective within 5 Minutes and it takes you hours and days to rectify. IF people will believe you.
This. Mud-slinging is exhausting, and something may stick even if completely unwarranted.
The line
Any forum user can troll you very effective within 5 Minutes
was posted by someone who got banned for posting really bad personal attacks, so this is the pot calling the kettle black. 
I actually don’t understand the meaning of that line. Did he mean that somebody on a forum can post a negative comment about your business? If so, then surely you are better to respond to it (in detail, as required) than to pretend it is invisible. And, informative participation on a forum generates more business
Nowadays, there is Trustpilot which is widely used for this. But TP will remove negative stuff if the target doesn’t like it; they ask the poster for evidence (I’ve had this a number of times from TP but I always had the details; I don’t have the time to post false garbage on TP or anywhere else).
A business which engages in a gratutious revenue generating practice needs to defend that practice, not complain that somebody exposed it in a forum And if they can’t defend it, they should not be doing it.
This is not unique to aviation; it runs across every B2C (business to consumer) sector.
The word Troll has a different meaning.
In my humble opinion (simply my point of view), we can see an example if this in the (in)famous LCP thread. People are understandably upset. But from being upset to accuse Vans for all sorts of stuff (no leadership, piss poor engineers, letting the customers take ALL the burden and so on), is a long stretch of what has really been going on.
The fact is (and most people agree with me) is that the LCP issue is hardly a ripple in the homebuilt aircraft pond, and at most a small nuisance for the affected customers. It’s nothing more than that in the grand scheme of things, and anybody making it catastrophe have no clue what they are talking about. Vans is a small business that more or less literally got the entire wrath of all the odd evilness the Corona situation had to offer. They simply couldn’t manage it, they got overwhelmed and almost died due to it.
This sort of things happens all the time (at some scale). What forums tend to do, is to blow them out of proportions and additionally view everything from one side.
At VAF they did handle it. I have nothing particularly good (or bad) to say about VAF admins, but this time they did indeed manage to see the bigger picture even though it was completely obscured in the beginning. And Vans posted good information there because of it.
Simply a result of dependence of income from advertising? Perhaps. But rather that than more LCP threads like the one we have had here IMO.
