There was an outage of an e commerce platform my company uses yesterday. I went to the forum where users gather and their was a thread where someone said his stores were down. Replies came in every minute for an hour basically saying "me too". Out of 59 posts, maybe 5 had some value. It's a pet peeve of mine, but those posts bug me. There it's off my chest.
Hello tbarr... I understand your pet peeve completely, however, understand that most users really have nothing that can be of value in resolving the problem and so really have no worthy input. It can be a help to the website owners though sometimes if many comments are made in the forum to alert them that something is wrong.
I was on a forum recently that had got rid of the 'Post Reply' button and replaced it with a button that said 'Add Value to this Thread' ... they making a good point.
One or maybe a few comments would alert others but 59 non-value added comments don't help. It actually hides valuable input like a link to a status page or a report from a support service. Good idea. I might add form submission validation to check for the length of the post and if it contained me or too and hit them with an alert that says "Are you sure you are adding something of value?"
Why didn't you just throw up a "We're aware of the situation. Thanks for the notices. If you have anything, please feel free to do so. If you don't, please remember that posting a "me too" post just pulls the folks away from trying to fix the problems and causes more problems and more dowetime. We will update when more information is available. Please do not ask for updates." And if that doesn't help. "Thanks again for the responses. Please remember that posting "me too" just pulls techs away from solving the problem and causing the outage to last longer. Please remember that abusing the staff is an AUP violation payable by a $500 fine to the host if not deleting of the account, publishing those nuddie pictures we have of you and that airline stewardess (We told you that those would come bite you on the ass but no you didn't believe us.) and a full page advertisement within the New York Times with your picture and Bert from Seceme Street. Thank you again for your corporation."
Well if it was my forum, that could be done. The forum i recently saw it on was not mine and was not owned by the service that the forum discusses. That thought crossed your mind? In other words. me too.