I would find it very helpful to know the OS and equipment that a member is using, especially when I am trying to troubleshoot a technical problem. For example, I have no idea whether the dreaded red frame issue is exclusive to macs or windows users. That would tell me a lot.
Thanks for trying to answer my question on Adobe's behalf. I was kind of hoping to discuss improving user profiles with an Adobe rep or another user who had similar concerns. How else can a user sift through all of these postings to find pertinent information? What I'm hearing you say is that "it is what it is." From what I can tell, it is game to see who can chime in with a comment more than anyone else. And it's a game that's not even run by Adobe, the company that puts its name on the top of the page.
I suggest that Adobe and Jive change the name to "Anonymous Friends of Adobe Help Desk Contest." Adobe should launch another site where users who make a living using Adobe software can freely exchange ideas and read frequent contributions from authorized and knowledgeable representatives of the company. A "Forum" is what they call it, I think.
Users can choose to fill in their Community profile as much or as little as they wish. There is a section to enter details of your Adobe products, operating system, etc but for the majority of customers it isn't that simple. All Creative Cloud subscribers can install on Windows and OS X at the same time, they can be using the a product or service on an iPad, a desktop computer or a Windows Phone, and passing files between all three. Many customers have a desktop and laptop with completely different hardware, and software build numbers that change on a daily basis. The pertinent information will always be specific to the question being asked - we don't care in the slightest what your GPU driver version is if Acrobat can't print a copy of your tax return, nor do we care what fonts you have installed if Premiere Pro won't render an AVI. Presenting a customer with a mountain of mandatory form fields before they are allowed to ask a question, 99% of which are irrelevant, will make all our lives a lot easier as none of them will bother posting anything.
Crash reports sent to Adobe via the OS vendors contain all the information required to trace a bug, but Adobe does not demand any information at registration beyond that required to create an ID and a screen name, for obvious reasons of privacy and security. Product spaces within the Community have guidelines on the type of information that may be helpful to provide within a question, depending on what the subject is. Some products, such as those in the video group, have detailed suggestions of what to include because of the technical nature of the information we often need to know. When a customer leaves out a critical detail they will be asked for clarification and assisted to find the information if necessary. It's a conversation - we don't expect every thread to be one perfect question followed by one correct reply. Many times the customer has no idea what's wrong so can't work out what to tell us until the conversation has progressed a little.
Of course the Community is "run by Adobe". Adobe pays the bills and sets the rules, but this is not a 1:1 link between you and a product manager. We do have staff presence in the popular product areas to assist with setup, and some product engineers volunteer their time to get involved in the conversations, but engineers are paid to write code, not hang around on a forum. The people who have already replied to you in this thread have an MVP badge. That means they are the most knowledgeable Adobe product experts you'll find anywhere. The responses they give are just as good, if not better, than anything you'll get from a Customer Care agent.
Any more insults thrown around and we will moderate you.
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