AT&T closing the community forum where subscribers could vent
AT&T will apparently be closing its popular community forums website, after many years of service to subscribers. People usually go there to ask questions about unlocking their phone, promos, plan prices, technical or software difficulties.
The forums notch activity on a daily basis, with nearly 890,000 posts since their inception, and there are storied users there with participation honor badges, reactions, and all the other makings of a good and valuable community forum.
"Our Community Forum will be shutting down on June 27, 2024. Please visit att.com/support for all your support needs," reads the carrier's warning now, indicating that Community Forum users will have to deal with the comparatively slow and cumbersome official customer support channel.
According to a statement that the carrier sent to Light Reading, it will all be for the benefit of AT&T's customer base:
After careful consideration, we've made the decision to sunset our Community Forums. We're committed to providing our customers with the best support experience possible, and we believe this can be accomplished through our dedicated expert care support channels, where they have the option to engage with us directly.
AT&T spokesperson, June '24
There probably isn't a direct connection, but AT&T just followed T-Mobile's plan price increase, and announced that it will be raising the monthly payment of its grandfathered plans by $10/month.
Needless to say, AT&T subs on older plans who loved their contracts were nonplussed about the decision, and some took to the Community Forums to vent about the plan price hikes.
The decision to close the Community Forum website, however, and migrate its 1.6 million strong user base to the regular AT&T support channel, has probably been taken much earlier than the old plan price increase announcement.
AT&T is on a quest to cut costs and raise revenue, after all, and recently announced a 3-year plan to save $2 billion in expenses, so the Community Forums shuttering is probably just collateral damage from the business costs restructuring, rather than some nefarious plan to silence grandafthered plan subscribers amidst the price hikes.
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