Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

I'm wondering if he's that Schrodinger chappy, he had a cat, kept it in a box apparently

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

The bigger issues probably relate around user names and how to merge them. There are plenty of ways of dealing with that though and again that could have been worked out without closing the fora.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

When merging forums, the merging of accounts is normally based on email address.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Yes, exactly, because although usernames could potentially have been duplicated between the VM and O2 fora, email addresses are globally unique.

Surely they must have realised that potential for duplicate usernames and worked out some means of mitigating against that beforehand.

Like you said before, migrating and merging fora is not exactly a completely new science, yes there are always outliers and a few gotchas, but VM and O2 have apparently been preparing for this for months, so why it has now become ‘difficult’ is hard to comprehend.

Unless, and let’s use Occam’s razor for this, they didn’t actually do any preparatory work, because they never intended for the fora to come back. Or, let's be less cynical, senior management ignored advice from their respective technical people and simply didn't allocate enough resources to the job.

I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine which is the more likely!

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

surely dupe user names with different emails could simply be suffixed with a number like windows does with files ?

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Different systems use different methods.
The last one I did appended "_1" to one of them.
So yours, for example, would have become "Jaymoss_1"

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Maybe if we look at the example of the VM / O2 user account merger exercise some time ago, should we be surprised ?

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Agreed - that was a real pita to get my accounts merged (as my VM was @ntlworld and my O2 was @hotmail) - it kept getting stuck in loops, as it wouldn’t recognise the other email, then I couldn’t access either account by their original logins.

It took a 70 minute call and clearing of caches and cookies to finally consolidate them into one login…

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

It's now been, what four-five, months on to this ‘temporary downtime’ and still no functioning forum. I suspect the Russian (one week max) Special Military Operation will end before VM and O2s forums actually work.

No I’m joking, they simply aren’t coming back, ever, are they?

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

No, that was always the plan.

The rif raff will soon forget about it, and VMs many issues more hidden. They need to control the 'narrative' , not some oiks who can post their recurring same issues for all to see. Its bad karma for them.

Still, its more business for this forum ;)

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

You perhaps should look at there Facebook account. The best way I have found to sort things out

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

I'd rather do without a VM forum than be forced to have a Facebook account, but that's just me ... ;)

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Surely it is possible to use Facebook, without exposing yourself to them. Not taken it up yet but surfshark seem to offer a work around. Not signed up to it yet , so not sure.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Don't have an FB account and never will. The point of a help forum is that your issue and the solution is there for those with a same issue too see. Towards the end of the forums demise, the VM staff insisted on resolving issues via private messages, which helped no one else. That was the beginninng of the end.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Quite right, similarly I will never, ever have a FB or X WhatsApp account, so although you may be able to view a limited number of existing posts, to report your own fault and/or ask a question, you absolutely need an account. So any VM customers in either of our positions now have little option but to sample the delights of VM’s award winning* telephone support provision, and so have to deal with the relentless upselling strategy.

*for some definitions of award winning.

Yes excellent Mr K :)

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Yes but except, unlike the ex. VM forum’s VIPs, anyone on here has no sway with VM. Although posters on here may well have knowledge of how it works and can give advice or how to proceed, but, ultimately, it’s about as useful as posting on X. It might be picked up and dealt with, but I wouldn’t bet on it!

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Its unlikely to be picked up and dealt with from this forum, afaik we have no members now who are active VM CS agents.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

I wonder what happened to Benmcr, he was very helpful.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

I haven't seen it mentioned on here, but last week ispreview had a story in line with this:

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.ph...um-merger.html

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

SO, back to the drawing board, albeit with new Forum software. Some interesting comments in that ISP Preview piece.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

What happened? Did it turn out that NTL/Virgin had actually been stringing him along & only offered him a job to get him to close the Nthell forum?

Did he then start this forum as an alternative way to bring it back (or wasn't this forum anything to do with the situation?)

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

I don’t understand what is causing such a huge problem. Why don’t they just start a new forum from scratch? Talk about making the job harder!

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Not exactly, the owner of the original nthellworld.com site, sold it to NTL back in, I think around 2002, and was briefly employed by them. In its then form, the forum was closed by NTL about a year later.

In an amazing display of not understanding how websites work, NTL failed to realise that this person also owned the domain nthellworld.co.uk, and a forum based on that domain name was set up - because who could possibly have seen that coming!

That forum then became the precursor of this forum, it was renamed and relaunched prior to NTL and Telewest merging to form Virgin Media.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

True, they might aswell start from scratch, most will have forgotten their passwords by now anyway.

However I still doubt how genuine they are about resurrecting it. More likely VM were hoping the punters forgot it existed. What happened to the VM staff running it? Are they still employed, or are they suddenly going have to recruit new staff which seems unlikely.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

The forum staff also doubled as ‘helpers’ on their various social media platforms, I assume that is still the case, although there was a suspicious mass-exodus of forum staff in the months before the closure.

So make of that as you will.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Forums are now considered old hat, it's all about social media these days.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

https://www.cableforum.uk/board/show...highlight=Paul

Paul owns cable. Those beliefs are hilarious :rofl:

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

no, he (and Richard) are right, people would rather ask on Farcebook, twitter and tiktok than join a forum.
Lots of gaming communities have also now descended to the depths of Discord :(

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Reddit is the other place where a lot of conversation has gone.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

absolutely nothing stopping VM having a discord channel. In fact it makes sense too. They could even have support in there and the costs to them minimal . Same as nothing stopping them having a legit presence on FB however there is a plague of people making up support names now FB allows nom de plumes and I am sure stupid people fall for it but all the same I have had support off Octopus for example on X Tesco and Asda on FB.

I feel it is good to be able to post in public and hold them accountable where more people will see it as to get quicker support. I have always been of the mind a squeaky wheel gets the grease

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

I always get decent support from Asda on FB.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Which is good, but there is an obvious problem, you need to have a FB account!

Admittedly, we are in a minority but there are people who will never touch FB with someone else’s bargepole, let alone our own - even if I think I’ll only use it for VM support, Zuckerborg will absolutely hoover up even more of my information - ditto for Instagram, WhatsApp; and the less said about X the better.

I don’t want, and refuse to have, any sort of social media presence (membership on here probably doesn’t count); so am I now denied proper support?

---------- Post added at 20:47 ---------- Previous post was at 20:43 ----------

Conversation, maybe, but official help?

Unless VM employees are hanging out on Reddit threads, interacting and offering to help, then it’s fairly pointless.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Are you referring to Asda ? In which case you can just ring them.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

No, not specifically Asda, but any company which simply assumes that everyone has a social media account and can, or is willing to seek help using such a method.

So, you have to resort to phone support, fine, but many companies are running that down, dumping it onto offshore call centres where the people are not trained and can do nothing more than simply follow a set of cues on the machine in front of them.

It’s almost as if they don’t really want to provide support to their customers.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

I've perfected the ultimate 'stare' when I buy something and the person at the till asks me if I have an email address

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

https://www.cableforum.uk/images/local/2026/06/5.gif

They probably think you’re having a stroke*

*and not in a ‘nice’ way;)

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Not bothered what they think, I just know they don't need my email address just because I've bought an electric kettle :D

edit: that's a fairly close likeness Hugh . . apart from the hair colour ;)

oh, and at my age any kind of stroke could finish me off :rofl: :naughty:

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Me I say none of you business :shocked:

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

The problem there is that the poor person in front of you requesting your email address, has, no doubt been told/ordered to get the customer's address, OR ELSE.

Just make something up, bonus points for looking up the name of the CEO of the company, taking a guess as to what his or her email address is and supplying that.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Or…
No, thank you…

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

If asked I just say "Sorry, its private", no one has ever had an issue with this.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

I have a "spam" Gmail account for stuff like this so it's not a problem.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

So I'll change to none of your companies business.

---------- Post added at 12:10 ---------- Previous post was at 12:08 ----------

Why would I want to thank them for asking something that is not for them to know.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

You're not, you're thanking them for accepting your rejection of their suggestion to share the information, its just polite really, kinda going out of fashion these days admittedly

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Most house moves are quicker than VMs community forum move....

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Well we need to consider the following;

a) does VM even want a customer forum?
b) if so have they done any sort of due diligence as to a new provider?
c) have they created a plan for moving data from the old to the new platform?
d) if they have then why is it taking so long to execute on it?
e) the original plan was to merge the VM and O2 forums. This seems to have been abandoned, why? Was no planning done beforehand to check the feasibility of doing this?

I think it’s fairly obvious what the answers to these questions are.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Without reading the whole thread again to see if someone has already said this, shouldn't Virgin/O2 have already been working on this before closing down the forums so they could have a "seamless" transfer if they were ever going to have the forums again. Having a seamless transfer might be a bit too much to expect from VM/O2.

Maybe this is the time to say goodbye to other forum members like japits, newappollo etc and not having different opinions. ��

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Apparently the move has been deemed a failure and O2 forums are back next month, dont know if it means the same for VM forums though.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

What a surprise - not!

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Say goodbye ?

Where have you got this from ?

Yes it seems to me they have gotton behind in what they wanna do.. It doesnt mean they are going to abort it totally..

No reason to say Goodbye to anyone...

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

No seriously, trust me this is a typical VM move, decide to do something, no doubt ignore any and all advice from the technical people - in fact fire them for contradicting senior management, crash on regardless and then run up against the hard wall of reality.

Merging two support forums together, well, I’m sure it's not a trivial issue, but it’s been, what, how many months now? Surely both VM and O2 did some degree of due diligence before embarking on said merger? Yes/no?

I’m going to hazard a guess, in a cost-cutting exercise both VM and O2 managed to get rid of all the senior people who actually knew how the systems worked. And now they are stuck with people who lack the skills and knowledge to implement it.

ON the original VM forums, they stated, back in I think February, a temporary pause while they migrate to a new platform - now seven months later and nothing. Seriously what does that say about VM and O2’s competence?

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

There's a guy considering opening his own alternative forum. He's currently asking for opinions as to whether it should include AI to help people to quickly & easily understand Virgin t&c's etc.

Virgin are too dim to realise that, where they leave a void, others will fill it and they won't have any control over what's said.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Ummmm, you mean like Cable Forum ;)

We did that about 23 years ago (even longer if you include NTHW, and its .com predecessor).

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

I think it was a MSE post, but since my memory is no longer fresh I am not 100% on it.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Absolutely true, but the fact is that the official VM community forums had members who were VM employees and could positively act on various posts in an official capacity.

Yes, I am fully aware that this forum has VM employees as members, but can they act on posts, could they, honestly, ask a poster with an issue, to send them their details, account number etc. and ‘short-cut’ the normal support provision?

I suspect woe betides any VM employee who does this.

At best, this forum and any other third party one will be in the same boat, at best some knowledgeable people may respond but at the very best can only advice.

I have responded to a post on the VM internet section, I’m fairly certain I know what the issue will be. But neither I nor anyone on here can ‘force’ the issue. At the very best I can advise and suggest what the customer tells the tech when they turn up.

A forum such as this can advise, at best, but not directly help anyone.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

If the proper forum doesn't start up again then we might not have different opinions about things on a good relationship trying to help people.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Actually we used to do this, semi-officially, before VM finally got their own forum up and running. We knew who the VM staff were (the ones who wanted to be known, anyway) and we would verify them by exchanging emails via their work inbox. After that if someone on here claimed to be staff and wanted to help, a member of the CF team could vouch for them.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Yes Chris, I fully understand and, in fact recognise a few members on here as being VM employees.

But the difference was, if someone posted on the (now defunct) VM forum with a problem, a member of the forum team there would offer to engage via private message and request things like account number, address, account holder's name etc. and based on that would work behind the scenes and, well, get stuff done. But the VM employees were obviously identified by special badges etc. against their names.

Now consider this, I have an issue and request help on here, and someone responds claiming to be an VM employee and asks for my account number, etc, to help me out. What should I do?

What I am absolutely not going to do is to hand over information to some random person on a third-party forum.

You see the problem here?

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Absent us re-starting our own verification, which worked really very well back in the day, the problem is obvious. However there were a great many cases on this forum where users really did give their details to VM staff who we had verified. It worked great.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

I wouldn't share account details on a public forum or even with individuals I have only encountered via public fora.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Forums operated on trust and hope a lot, back in the day (we are talking about 20 years ago now!). Concerted efforts at data threat weren’t quite such a thing and more’s the point there was no GDPR legislation, which would make any attempt at organised, verified sharing difficult enough even on a VM owned forum, and an absolute nightmare somewhere like here. I don’t think there’s much chance of us trying to resurrect it. Any such assistance would have to be on trust, unofficial and very much below radar.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Exactly, on the old VM forums, which were run by them, staff members could be easily identified. So if they sent a direct message to customer in response to a post, requesting information to verify their identity, you could be reasonably sure that this was legit. Fine!

On any third-party forum, that level of trust is gone, you have to rely on a forum mod to vouch that ‘generic_user128’ really does work for VM, honestly guv!

But, let’s assume that ‘generic _user128’ really is a VM employee, why would they engage wit someone on a third-party forum, take details and short-cut the official channels - probably a disciplinary offence? The VM forum was considered a legitimate method of raising a complaint or requiring help, and the team on there were empowered to take that on. No third-party forum, including this one, can possibly replicate that; nor should they.

No Chris is right, the old VM forums can't be replicated; at best, at very best, VM employees might be able to give some advice as to how to proceed and what they think your issue might be. But other than that, they are not able to actually take issues forward.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

:tu: to all of the above, but let’s not forget, this site and its predecessors operated reasonably well in just that mode even before we developed semi-formal relationships with some helpful staff.

NTHellworld rose from the ashes once, maybe it will again. :D

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

We had a relationship with them at one time (to pass on issues) set up with/by Simon Duffy, who was NTLs CEO (I think) at the time.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Hi. Long time lurker. Literally.
I used to manage the VM Community. *Ducks and hides*
No really.
The lack of a site is so sad. We used to celebrate it's birthday each year August 11th I think. It would be 17 this year. Old enough to drive away onto Highway 404

The VM forums worked for a couple of reasons.

1. Yes, we were officially there. We would try and work out who you were from your email address and troubleshoot. More info on a direct message. It was a PII and data privacy nightmare and I'm glad I left as the new GDPR rules came in!
2. Peer to peer support. For every answer our team provided, the forum users provided 2 or 3. That was the great. My job was essentially to cheer lead your participation and sharing your cleverness, saying things that we weren't allowed to!
3. Seo. The biggest driver of traffic was always Google. We might have 5000 posts a week, but we'd have millions of page views each year. That is where forums help businesses, by giving people answers before they ever need to post or call.

I still work in communities, and traffic is on the decline - AI LLMs are trawling communities and serving up the answers without you having to click on the site. It's harder to prove the value of investment.

In VMs defence, the migration and merger will have been very difficult. I've successfully managed a number of migrations which have been significantly smaller, and they were troublesome enough

The VM issue is that you could use any old email address to register, so your forum account was not linked to your VM account. If that had been the case, and the same with O2, it would have been easier I'm sure. With the wild west approach to registration it becomes very hard to avoid duplication across two platforms etc.

Anyway, to those of of you I recognise here, hi, hope you are well, and the important thing you can do as consumers and fans of cable is to support each other. The behind the scenes support was the icing on the cake - the real value of community is what we built there, and you built here, together

2.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

:welcome: … we survived the rise of Facebook, we’ll survive the rise of AI. As you say, authentic community and peer support is what forums do well. AI literally has no idea what it’s saying (I do use it myself but only in areas where i already have a grasp of the subject so I can spot obvious errors, and there are plenty), and social media is just too easy come easy go. Forums have always required a little bit of deliberate engagement, which is why, when they work, they work well.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

I think the problem is getting "users" to use proper Forums. It's all about apps at the moment. Even the VM Forum in it's last days was a mess to navigate and the setup was designed to be viewed on a phone IMHO. The days of sitting at a desktop or even laptop to use a Forum is over seemingly, at least that's what the kids are telling me :-)
I'm guessing the VM Forums will not return anytime soon, if at all ...

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

I'm just a simple old fuddy duddy, but don't mind changes as long as they're a benefit to me, and not just the instigators of the changes.

I don't 'do' the social media stuff, and I've tried to get along with Discord but it's not for me, so if it's not a forum (as such) then I don't engage ;)

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

The problem is VM pretending they ever had any intention to continue the forum. They had no intention and wanted it closed. Too costly, and it exposed their poor CS. They just kicked into the long grass and hoped the punters would forget...

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Yep, does sound like a fair assumption.

---------- Post added at 21:38 ---------- Previous post was at 21:18 ----------

You know, I am so glad you posted this, it is exactly why I mourn the loss of the old VM forums.

Yes the ‘old’ forum staff could find out who a poster/customer was and work on their issues. However, towards the end, these threads tended to end with ‘let’s take this to personal message’ and then radio silence. One and only one forum team member would actually come back to the thread and say that this issue has been resolved and it’s now OK. Now no doubt she has been ‘let go’ for the crime of being ‘too helpful to paying customers’.

Now the forum merger, yes, I’m sure it wasn’t a trivial exercise, but VM and O2 absolutely messed it up, no? They made a claim that xyz would happen, did they do any sort of due diligence to see if this was feasible? Of course not, or I suspect what few competent people they still employ, would have told them, but were ignored.

Come on, as an ex-VM employee, you must have seen the writing on the wall.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

When I left the community was doing really well, so no!

I don't know what they use behind the scenes anymore, but all comments on twitter, Facebook and community were funneled into a tool provided by Lithium, the company now called Khoros, and the community platform too. Khoros have been taken over and all the brilliant people there have been let go as they try to make it an AI company.

At one point or another all the telcos (sky, BT, O2, Giffgaff, Vodafone, VM, Talk talk) have been on Khoros it was a serious, weapons grade forum tool to build a platform on.

Moving away from that will have been really hard, because until they got bought out, Khoros were the market leaders, the best most fully featured community platform. Migrating not one but two massive forums from Khoros to another provider would be a huge challenge as there are so many functionalities that are completely missing on a number of forums.


Add to the this the potential need to find a new way of replying to forum messages and social media posts.... Again, if they've had to do both at the same time it will not have been easy. I'm certainly not a massive fan of twitter any more, and believe that forums are amazing. But working for Virgin it's where people contacted us. I remember us sending our millionth tweet, and then 2 million not so long after. Getting that platform right is important.

With community though, I'm too far out of the VM scene to know what's going on. Maybe there has been a drop off. I used to check in when I was feeling nostalgic, but without seeing the data, I found it hard to gauge how it was doing.
But there real value in community is the fact it's almost a VM Wikipedia, a crowd sourced knowledge base of helpful answers. If it closing means they have a lot more callers, then I'm sure it's a priority to get it back.

As I say though, I'm long gone from VM. No idea what's happening

---------- Post added at 23:35 ---------- Previous post was at 23:33 ----------

I totally prefer forums, but I only use a laptop for work. Everything else is on my phone, and I love a mobile friendly user experience.

However you really lose the sense of activity with a mobile forum mode. It all becomes quite tiny and transactional and you literally / figuratively can't see the bigger picture.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

"If it closing means they have a lot more callers, then I'm sure it's a priority to get it back.”

Or possibly not, a phone call in, does give an opportunity for an upsell, whether or not they manage to fix the issue. A classic one being the oft mentioned, ‘oh you have connectivity issues, i can see that you have x number of devices attached, you really need to upgrade to a higher tier and that will definitely fix the issue’!

A cynical person might conclude that VM may well want to encourage this, and a community forum, which may well offer contradictory advice is therefore to be discouraged.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

Then , I'm one of the cynical people. ;)

Customer service counts for nothing, profits everything. VM wanted the forum closed, the charade of redevelopment/merger was a smokescreen.

Re: VM Community Forum Move
 

I'm starting to think you may be correct ...