[gorgonzola]

Based on an idea that someone emailed me the other day, as well as thread that was started in the Suggestions/Comments forum, I've been thinking about creating an Apple Developer Connection forum for ADC members and Apple employees to discuss things that are normally under NDA.

ADC developers complain because there is no official Apple mailing list for developers to ask questions about Mac OS X seeds they get in the mail, and we really can't allow that in our general forum, because most of the people asking how to fix something are people who have just downloaded a build, and even so, Apple Legal considers it piracy, doesn't like it, and emails us about it.

Given the large number of developers on these boards, and given the huge amount of interest in Mac OS X 10.1, I think it would be feasible to open a new private forum for ADC members (probably Select/Premier) and Apple Employees to discuss these issues.

There's one catch, though, so I was hoping some ADC member would clarify this -- this must be a private forum, and you will have to email us and offer some confirmation that you are ADC Select/Premier or an Apple employee so we can add the necessary authorization to your account manually. Now, the verification is where I'm a little unsure. Apple employees would obviously have @apple.com addresses, so that's easy enough. Is there some ID number or something that we can use to verify that a person from a certain email address actually has a Select/Premier ADC account? If this is possible, the forum is feasible, otherwise it really isn't. I'm sure a lot of people would want to get in, so we need to have a solid way to verify that the person is legit. Can someone shed some light on this?

Finally, I need to know how many people are interested. If enough people are interested, we can contact Apple and check with them if this forum is okay (which we do want to do -- no point making a forum if Apple engineers won't go there and answer questions) to make.

If you're an ADC member or an Apple employee and are interested in this forum, please post here to that effect. I need to make sure there's really enough support for this before I clear it with everyone else.

Don't concern yourselves with the specifics of whether this is feasible or whether Apple will say yes -- if there is enough support shown, I can still approach them with a solid backing, and I can also suggest that they start their own mailing list or something.

Just let me know if you're interested in this by posting here (only people who get seeds, obviously -- I don't care if you don't, since you wouldn't get access to the forum anyway ;-)

thanks,
-gorgonzola.

[amonitzer]

Being a select developer, I'd think that it would be very cool. However, there's no possibility to check for NDA-email addresses I know of. Maybe you should talk about it with some Apple-rep.

A concern Apple might have is that your admins/moderators would still be able to read that forum, so they'd have to sign that NDA, too (if they haven't done so already).

[wadesworld]

While I think your idea is good and such a forum is needed, I doubt Apple will permit it to exist here. Allowing "secret" company information to exist on someone else's server is generally not good policy.

However as to verification, when a user establishes or renews their ADC Select/Premier account, Apple sends them and email confirming it. That's how you could verify it. If they can't produce the email, then they're out of luck until the next year, unless they can get ADC to send them an email confirming their membership.

Wade