So... GarbageDog... you write that blog? I chose that feed because I so thuroughly enjoy it on a day to day basis. We certainly appreciate the back link.
This is rather interesting.
I do agree that CC does a poor job of hiring competent employees to sell their products, at least in our area... and obviously according to CR, in many areas. Had I not already done some investigations on the iPod that we were looking for... I wouldn't have gotten the info at CC the other night. When we got there we had two different sales people walk by us doing nothing. I asked one of them was he the guy for iPods and he said he didn't know anything about them but would get me someone. Shortly a young girl comes around the corner and asked could she help us. I in reply asked her if she was the iPod expert (not that I needed an expert - just a comment - we knew what we wanted). She replied that she wasn't an expert but could sell us a unit. She didn't even know it was on sale. Later our friends who were with us were looking at a few of the VCR/DVD-RW units. The fella who was selling in that area reached his had up, gently raising the small info tag stuck on the counter below the particular unit in question and exclaimed that this particular unit has bla bla bla and read the info tag... then run his finger across the front of the display machine and read the labels on the machine itself... duh. There could have very well been competent employees around, we just didn't get to meet them.
We could learn something from this I suppose. First, if we are gonna shop at CC, know what we need to know before going there to buy and simply use it as a place to pick up what you want. A good reason for them to have the online ordering and pick-up service. Second, if CC has the same type of people running their forum and answering questions at their forum... I can see where folks wouldn't get that much valuable info. Granted there might be people there that are members who might know more, but I wonder if they would actually hang out there for a long time.
If we are aware of the reviews like CR provided and experiences such as ours at CC the other night... in those situations I would think we would gather that the CC forum wouldn't necessarily be the right place to go and learn about a product we wanted to buy. For those that are not that familiar with forums, I don't know that it would be considered bad taste as much as it would just being unfortunate. I also suspect this could be a large number of people simply shopping online. CC is advertised pretty well and probably a lot of people go online to shop there... run across the CC forum and it may very well be the only forum they've ever seen or know of.
As to malicious attacks... those kinds of things concern me even here at the Shack. It's hard to control what links are posted to where. I can only imagine somewhere like AVS being a nightmare to control links. Of course we are not taking credit cards or selling anything so maybe that helps us be less of a target... but there are other ways to be malicious.