Adobe thinks my registered copy of CS6 is a "free trial".

[Dennis37062484f9i2]

I'm currently using a copy of CS6 I purchased and registered in June of 2012.  Today I launched InDesign and got a message from Adobe "My free trial is up in 27 days."  How do I contact Adobe concerning the matter? They're "contact us" section is useless.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

There are still ways to activate pre-CS/CC versions, but the keyhole is shrinking in both technical and customer support terms. CS6 and earlier are increasingly out of step with modern systems,  even if you lock it down on a Win7 system (which, of course, brings its own problems).

You probably need to move on from 12-year-old software, even if you did buy it. Not much from that era still runs, or is likely to run much longer.

[Dennis37062484f9i2]

Thanks for the reply, but other than this "trial" message, all was and is currently running fine–no glithes.  I maintain an older OS (mac) and this older version of the Creative Suite to keep compatibility with some older clients, and the fact that I refuse to be held hostage to a monthly fee.  I just need a phone number so I can talk to a REAL person at Adobe to get this bug fixed.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

There are ways to activate CS6; you can search here for prior discussions or wait for someone with that info to see your post.

But what you've done is validate my comments: yes, it's worked great... until now. But there's no support for versions that old, technical or CS. I think Adobe has formally closed out some older versions, meaning their entire response is "Good luck!" This issue is not going to go away, and next year you may not be able to reactivate it again when your system hiccups. Only part of this is in Adobe's hands; older OSes and older hardware have all their own age-out issues as well. Computers don't simply keep working forever unless they are wholly standalone.

(ETA: I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect live support on a product that old, to be honest, but for some reason software is thought to be eternal in that respect.)

I understand all the arguments and issues — and the resistance to the subscription model — but you and your clients are hanging out on a wire, here. I'd start looking for more stable solutions; you might look at Affinity Publisher, for example, which is a semi-compatible tool of modest cost that is not subscription-based. (Which then brings back all the fun of the bad old days of no two shops having compatible versions of the software, but you can't have everything.)