Shame on you, Texas Instruments

[jipihorn]

Hello,

I'm the head of the electronic laboratory of the cyclotron resource center (CRC) at the university of Louvain la Neuve in Belgium.
In fact, the CRC is a little different from a standard part of a university. The cyclotron used to be used in research and medical, but now it is used to harden electronic chips and to make micro-porous plastic films. The CRC is full financed by private customers, so it is like a company within the university. We are fully self-financed by private customers (Atmel, Infineon, Airbus...). But, being into the university site, we are a part of the university and using its IT , so we have the its mail domain.

A few times ago, I had an account to the TI-E2E forum that worked and suddenly, I was unable to post anything. After searching about this, I got the answer : no mail address from private people or university are allowed to use TI-E2E.
So, as a private company, we can not use the TI forum because we have a university mail domain.

First, why universities can not have access to a online forum is already unjustifiable. No other chip manufacturer would dare to do so. We pay the components the full price, we don't have any advantages and, on the opposite they are very keen to autorise us to create an account on the web shop, make orders and, of course taking our money. They are very efficient and open for that, no mail domain filtering.

Secondly, using the mail domain as a filter is so stupid that words fail me. How could they decide that a mail domain is OK and an other one is not ? Especially in this case where universities can host a lot of different structures, like the CRC, that are private societies.

So, I opened a ticket and, being quite irritated, I ask for the the hard questions in order to get real explantations, not corporate bullshit or automated answers.

To make things shorts, I finally got the autorisation for my own mail (and only mine)  to post on the  TI-E2E forum. So, victory !
I tested it, and it worked.

A few weeks later, I had a question about a chip and tried to post something : denied. My mail address is a university one, so it is rejected.

They remove the autorisation, without any notice (which is particularly rude) and with no reason. So I had to open a new ticket (a multi-billion dollar company, in 2024, can not reopen an closed one) and the answer is :

Hi Jerome,

It is with this regret to inform you that your request to have access on E2E forum has been declined by the E2E moderator.

I understand that you are working as admin on your university but due to the fact that you still using university domain @uclouvain.be, this is denied. Refer to this FAQ:

•   [FAQ] New posting requirements for E2E Support Forums

Apology for this inconvenience.

End of the story.

How this is possible ?
How such moderation incompetence can exist ? Exactly like an IT would forbid all network cards on all computers for your security. It works, but it is stupid. What I can see here is a lazy moderation team.

I'm disgusted when I see such behavior from a company, spitting on their customer face like that. They don't seem to understand that they make segregation based from the mail domain, probably the worse way to do this. Even if i could prove we are a private company, they don't care.

Shame on you TI, now I'll take all my chips at AD or Microchip.At least, they respect their customers.

Jerome.

[AndyC_772]

Shame on you TI, now I'll take all my chips at AD or Microchip.At least, they respect their customers.

That'll hurt you a lot more than it hurts TI.

Be pragmatic. Register a .com domain, set up email forwarding, use that address.

If you can't, because <IT policy>, recognise the irony that TI have a similar problem.

[jipihorn]

This is why it is ridiculous : I can take any "fake" mail domain and that's it.
That shows the level of incompetency.

J.

[Nominal Animal]

Only appearance matters in today's corporate culture.  Everything else is neglible.

[nctnico]

Shame on you TI, now I'll take all my chips at AD or Microchip.At least, they respect their customers.

That'll hurt you a lot more than it hurts TI.

Be pragmatic. Register a .com domain, set up email forwarding, use that address.

Indeed. TI has quite a few interesting parts. My guess is that TI just doesn't want to deal with questions from noobs and doing the homework for students who don't bother to read the documentation which is available (*). The latter are better served by going onto a generic electronics forum anyway.

And if a company really isn't part of a university, the company could really do with a commercial domain. Looks more professional to potential customers as well.

* Typically TI's documentation and app-notes are excellent. I never needed to use their forum to integrate any of their chips (not even when dealing with their ARM SoCs).

[pbernardi]

You can look for a TI distributor and explain their situation. I think the distributors are more willing to listen to your message - better than open an ticket, once this will be probably handled by IA at some level. Maybe they will also open a ticket, but hopefully with a different priority, and they usually know the people and can call them to discuss the issues.

For those requests such yours, I think people should avoid tickets and look for real people to get the problemas solved. Such problems needs decision from real people, and not only to follow a ticket protocol.

[soldar]

Typically TI's documentation and app-notes are excellent.

Many, many years ago I emailed the author of some TI paper and generally made some positive comments and observations and finally I said it was a pity the paper had many spelling and grammatical errors and it would be good to have it proof checked before publishing.

The author emailed me right back very irate and rude and berating me for demanding quality in something I had got for free.

I emailed someone higher up in the publishing department and got an apology and thanking me for my input.

The engineer who wrote that paper knew a lot about the paper's topic but was totally unqualified to deal with people.

[ebastler]

The engineer who wrote that paper knew a lot about the paper's topic but was totally unqualified to deal with people.

Get in touch with their marketing team if you prefer the opposite combination.

[nctnico]

Typically TI's documentation and app-notes are excellent.

Many, many years ago I emailed the author of some TI paper and generally made some positive comments and observations and finally I said it was a pity the paper had many spelling and grammatical errors and it would be good to have it proof checked before publishing.

I'd be far more interested if the contents is correct. For one of my current projects I'm writing software to control a rather complex chip. The datasheet is 600 pages and the register description is a whopping 1100 pages. But no info on how it all works together in sufficient detail to get something to work right off the bat. That would probably take another 1000 pages. 'Fortunately' I have an API (with full source code) together with some superficial examples and doxygen generated text. So yeah, I spend quite a bit of time reverse engineering the API code and just trying things as the support from the manufacturer (not TI!) stays rather quiet when I bother their support with deep technical questions.

[SiliconWizard]

I understand the frustration, but leaving access open without any kind of filter would probably lead to a completely unmanageable situation. Then the challenge becomes figuring out the "right" filters, and while it's easy to criticize theirs here, it is not to come up with something much better. So, I personally have no generic solution to that.

We can find it odd though that they would specifically filter out uiniversity domains, while many vendors actually do anything they can to get students to use their products as a marketing tool.

[Nominal Animal]

I understand the frustration, but leaving access open without any kind of filter would probably lead to a completely unmanageable situation. Then the challenge becomes figuring out the "right" filters, and while it's easy to criticize theirs here, it is not to come up with something much better. So, I personally have no generic solution to that.

Interestingly, both question-answer forums (at certain times of year inundated with homework questions), and open source projects, have to deal with the same problem.  (Open source projects by people who demand solutions without contributing anything back, because they are "users" and thus somehow "valuable" and "important" to the project.  "You will never be popular unless you do me a favour", and its variants.)

Using the email domain is among the least effective ways –– but very simple and very easy to deflect arguments to –– of limiting the human participant types.
Implementation-wise, it is a simple filter against a list of domains; and when questioned about it, it suffices for the provider to say "we do not accept members with emails from these domains"; there is no further need to elaborate, because they're free to choose their members as they see fit.

My snarky remark above reflects the fact that instead of trying to solve the problem –– the problematic behaviour, or whatever it is that those having an email address in one of the domains cause to the provider, be it direct or indirect ––, it is today perfectly acceptable to just do the minimum to avoid the appearance of the problem.  That is, it is more preferable to hide a problem, than actually solve it.  It drives me absolutely bonkers.

[Smokey]

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/technical-support-through-official-company-public-web-forums/

[jipihorn]

I understand the frustration, but leaving access open without any kind of filter would probably lead to a completely unmanageable situation. Then the challenge becomes figuring out the "right" filters, and while it's easy to criticize theirs here, it is not to come up with something much better. So, I personally have no generic solution to that.

We can find it odd though that they would specifically filter out uiniversity domains, while many vendors actually do anything they can to get students to use their products as a marketing tool.

There is a easy way : having the possibility to ask for your specific case (mail, ticket or whatever, they have an options for universities in their website) . This is what I did, and I got the access. We are a private company and we have to have the same right that the others, regardless our mail domain.
And suddenly, they decided that, no , we remove this right for no reason, without notice, which is rude and inexcusable - they don't have any actual argument to justify this.

Jerome.

[jonpaul]

No shame!

Similar for may  IC and instrument forums.

The cost of support, forums and Q&A is too much for the corp green eyeshades.

Expect these policies to speread.

We usualy get th EVB/App notes find the designer or app eng and contact directly.

Enjoy,

Jon

[BrokenYugo]

You're taking this far too personally, life is full of stupid arbitrary shit perpetuated by stupid arbitrary people. You can either waste your life fighting it (can't fix stupid) or find a work around and get on with it.

[temperance]

Indeed. TI has quite a few interesting parts. My guess is that TI just doesn't want to deal with questions from noobs and doing the homework for students who don't bother to read the documentation which is available (*). The latter are better served by going onto a generic electronics forum anyway.

I'm sure it's not that. I have no idea how many noob questions you will find on the TI forum but most questions I see in there are very basic such as people asking for advice without giving any useful input. Something along the lines: Sir make pwr spp with XYZ. Now sometimes burn but only on the left right never burn. We fast need help pls.