3CX operates a very active forum on their website, 3CX dot com. This forum, powered by XenForo, has almost half a million posts by over 125,000 members, in almost 100,000 threads. It’s widely considered to be the first place to go when asking for help with 3CX or to engage in a discussion with 3CX employees or other users.
The main parts of this forum include:
- Discussion on recent 3CX news (new releases, security patches, etc)
- Support for phones, sip trunks, 3CX itself, and more without engaging the official support team at $75 a ticket
- Feature requests (Ideas)
- A private Partner Only discussion place
3CX employees, up to and including the CEO, are very active on the forum – this is very commendable. Unfortunately, the CEO Nick Galea is also very active in wielding the ban hammer for anything posted on the forums that in any way questions or complains about 3CX. Should you say anything he perceives as negative about 3CX he will
- cancel your partnership if you are a partner
- cancel your license if you are an customer
- block you from getting support, even paid tickets
- block you from send emails (they will bounce)
- block your number from calling their phone system
- ban you from the forums
This often will occur with no warning.
This type of heavy handed moderation extends past the 3CX forums. One partner posted on Reddit and Nick canceled their partnership. In fact, Nick has been banned from Reddit for “doxxing” (exposing) people in the past.
This leads to 2 major issues, namely:
- Partners/Customers afraid to speak their mind because of retribution from 3CX.
- People researching 3CX only being exposed to the one side of 3CX without getting the full picture.
Many partners have shared that they stumbled into this one face first and had to backtrack and beg to get reinstated. One only needs to search “3CX Banned” to read countless stories on the web (the 3CX subreddit is a great place to look, as is the MSP and SysAdmin subreddits) about this behavior.
One last note about this moderation should be made. This applies to anything you say that does not praise 3CX, not only vile and vulgar messages people may post. 3CX has banned people before who have asked about systems now broken after 3CX changed the way a function worked with no notice. Another person posted on their linkedin that they were switching to another product and were banned from the forums right away. It’s so bad that many higher level partners have stated they simply won’t post about 3CX at all in fear of saying the wrong thing.
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