Freescale Support of this forum - (Or lack of)

[peg]

Hello,

It seems to me that although this forum has the most posts, the most participation and the least un-responded to enquiries, when expert official support is occassionally required it is not forthcoming. The far greater majority of queries in this forum are eventually answered by the many independant experts that seem to regularly patrol it. However on the rare occasions when this does not work out, there seems to be no system in place to bring it to the attention of Freescale support to finally resolve it.

Whilst I realise that that official support is not guaranteed here, it seems to be almost missing apart from a few experts in their "pet" subjects such as Pavel, Rocky etc.

I quote this from the announcements section at the front page of the forums:

"Freescale Support monitors these forums to provide answers and take your feedback."

When?

Two more recent threads that I offer as evidence are:

http://forums.freescale.com/freescale/board/message?board.id=8BITCOMM&message.id=7428

and

http://forums.freescale.com/freescale/board/message?board.id=8BITCOMM&message.id=7426

With the first, one would think that it would be in Freescale's interest to clear this up as the only conclusion that future readers can glean from this discussion is that the IIC module doesn't work very well at all and that Freescale appears not to care!

The second example has little future benefit as it ends with what I would say are four fairly knowledgeable participants dissagreeing on the actual operation of the discussed issue (2 to 2!).

For many at Freescale privy to the exact inner workings of this device the answer is a plain and simple Yes or No, but we are all left to wonder.......

[UK_CF_FAE]

Hi Peg,

You are one of the top contributors to this forum, and so I both recognise your commitment, and if you are concerned about lack of Freescale participation, then we at Freescale should take your concern on-board.

I'll make the following observations

1) The Freescale experts who really know our parts in all their detail are typically experts in just several part numbers.  The forum post that has a subject "I2C problems" is going to get ignored by the experts. The ever-helpful Alban tells us this frequently. The post with a subject "MC9S08QG4 - Unexpected behaviour of bit XYZ in register IICSC" is likely to get a response.

2) The posts that say "why does my code not work" and then dump a large source code do not have a chance of getting the experts involved. It's just too much work to go over the code, looking for that elusive error. In that position, I would define the problem in the body of the post, explain what cirrcumstances cause the fault, what I have done to isolate it, and then use the pack-and-go wizard in CodeWarrior to create a stripped down CW project that illustrates the problem. I'd post this to the site.

3) Looking at your references, I can see 2 immediate problems. Starting a post with "Freescale, I really hate your datasheets" is guaranteed to get ignored. Of more interest is the I2C problem, which resulted in 4 contibutors differing in their opinions. This relates to the old MC68HC908GP32, and this type of question really needs the designer of the module in question to outline how it should behave. With the GP32 being 8 or 9 years old, I guess that no-one at Freescale could categorically state what module should do. Remember that the "Freescale Experts" are not the designers, just the users of the devices.

4) My style on this forum is as follows: I look at the recent posts with no answers. I do my best to solve any of these that I can. If I see posts with several replies, I don't bother to look at them, and so if a post like 7426 is desperate for a Freescaler to come in with an opinion, it isn't going to be me, since I consider that there is some form of answer already.    

Peg, I hear what you are saying, and please feel free to nudge us Freescalers whenever you think we've been a bit quiet. We are trying our best to help all of our forum members, and we need experienced members like you give us your honest opinion about how the forum is working.

Thanks,

Mark

R60287

[peg]

Hi Mark,

I have an oft used saying that goes:

"The only thing worse than no information is the WRONG information"

 and this was my main point.

I have been on holiday for a couple of weeks and so have just read your post now.

I was whole-heartedly agreeing with your comments for the most part, however your comments in point 4 was exactly what I was really getting at. If the wrong answer is given there is no way to get the right one. And it stays there forever to lead others astray.

The point with relation to the GP was that if "experts" don't know, then surely they have the resources to track down somebody who does and supply an answer.

I quite often play the devil's advocate here in order to assist to extract the right information from other forum participants. Sometimes it works to find out that the answer was only a "I thought that was how it worked" or for them to re-iterate that they are quite sure they are correct. It also somtimes gets other lurkers to throw in their two cents worth in support of one or the other. Either way, generally it assists.