I don't think that it really matters if this thread is closed or not. Closing the thread makes nobody happy, I guess. It just feels right for me to do it.
According PTC employees attending the forum it must be said that this is basically a user-driven forum. PTC provides the platform and is resposible to keep it running but its not their job to answer question - nonetheless the 'marketing guy' actually did answer some questions competently concerning the usage of Prime and others 😉
Pushing people to close their threads seems to be necessary in many forums I attend - people seem to get sloppier, grabbing the answer and run away without any further comment.
But its a bit annoying that the reminders to close a thread are done as answers in the thread itself which then bubbles up the list as containing an unread message. I guess it would be a better approach to try to contact the users via PM and send them the link to the thread they should close. User who have forgotten about their thread or aren't interested anymore in the topic are not likely to be triggered by an answer in that thread but maybe by a PM. User who left the forum after having got an answer to their question can't be reach either way.
And to be fair it must be said that PTC employees scanning the forum and reacting like Olivier did (as far as I understand it, he forwarded the information about the bug to the development team) is far more than we were used to in the past here.
Of course, I would like to see a separate section here or on the homepage where you can report bugs in the software in a low-threshold manner and without having to register (and without having to be a paying customer) and which is also dealt with seriously by PTC in a timely manner (I always considered the ideas section a placebo). That would be a sign that PTC is making a serious effort to improve their software. The current situation, where only paying customers are allowed to post ideas or laboriously report a bug to PTC support, does not speak in favor of this.
Of course, a separate area for software bugs would not be a good advertisement if there was a lot of traffic there and sure a lot of 'garbage' would end up there, i.e. apparent bugs due to user incompetence, questions about handling the program that don't belong there, etc. It would undoubtedly be tedious to sort this out, but the effort would have to be made.
And yes, I agree that some serious bugs (and I consider a math software returning a wrong result to be serious) would justify a timely hotfix for the current version but I also guess that this will not happen.
And at last - whining and crying about the software having so many disadvantages will hardly persuade PTC to make improvements.
Not buying the software, not renewing the licenses anymore might be a better option 😉
