Broadband ISP TalkTalk confirms UK customer community forum is gone
A few months have now passed since consumer broadband provider TalkTalk said they were “working on a solution” after their community forum for customers unexpectedly went offline in June 2026. But the once popular feature has not returned and the provider now simply says it’s “no longer available” as a service.
The initial statement made it sound like the forum had been taken offline due to a fault or for maintenance reasons and would thus return once a “solution” was found. But at the time there was also some speculation that the ISP could have been seeking to emulate Vodafone’s forum removal or be shelving the feature as part of ongoing efforts to sell the business or cut costs.
In the past month TalkTalk has stopped talking about finding a “solution” and their website now simply states that the service is “no longer available“. Some of the provider’s customers have recently been asking ISPreview for an update, so we queried with TalkTalk whether there were any plans to return the forum to life anytime soon or if it is gone for good. The latter seems to be the outcome.
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A TalkTalk spokesperson said:
“We’re continuing to invest in the channels that help customers get support, guidance and answers to common questions more simply and efficiently. As part of this, our TalkTalk Community Forum is no longer available.
Customers can still find plenty of help – including troubleshooting guides and how-to articles – on our Help & Support pages: https://help-centre.talktalk.co.uk/
Alongside this, our continued investment in customer service gives customers access to dedicated, multi-skilled specialists to deliver a far more personalised, secure, direct experience online at MyAccount via live chat, and by phone.”
Community forums can be a bit of a double-edged sword for internet providers. On the one hand they can help to take pressure off support lines by enabling customers to share, confirm and find solutions for problems, which makes them particularly useful from the consumer perspective. But on the other hand, ISPs don’t always like seeing their problems being amplified by a community of customers and it requires additional resources to properly manage.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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It’s usually worse off for customers, not the spin BS management puff out about personalised support routes.
Forums can help people with resolution to specific issue, get group pressure for ISP to take on and resolve issues like peer routing, firmware issues in ISP router etc etc.
About time Ofcom mandated user forums for isps over a certain size. I’d avoid a mainstream provider if they didn’t have one.
I suspect that as Vermin Media havent brought back theirs since February, that they have quietly buried it too. These companies are cowards in my view. Hoping to wear down customers with scripted responses from CS agents, many clueless about the products, how it works, and just spout the reset router line out time and time again failing to recognise anyone technically competent on the phone or chat session.
you seemed to have forgotten to criticise BT ( like you do in most of your replies ) . oh hang on BT+EE+Plusnet have 3 separate customer forums ( have done for years ), that you havent praised them for
And likewise you fogot to mention that I have praised Openreach for rollout speed and other stuff on here too!!!
Just to share my experience with the forum you mentioned (VM) in its heyday was an excellent resource for customers to get more complicated problems resolved. It offered a convenient way of escalation for issues that weren’t solved with “switch it off and on again” Why a company (any company not just VM) would decide (and it was a very obvious, conscious decision) to kill it, especially as every idiot in CSC is a cost and every expert on the forums is free,is beyond me. Needless to say I’ve changed ISP.
My experience with the TalkTalk Community Forum support model was very positive & preferable to trying to communicate with someone in a far-off support centre.
They always had a team of 3-4 staffers monotoring the forum and the response times were always good. It is always easier to communicate technical queries when you can paste in data IMHO vs trying to explain it verbally.
I do note that many organisations are using WHatsApp for business as their support tool now, I expect that TT may follow that route.
The Talktalk forum was generally pretty good as it was staffed by employees of Talktalk. It was also locked down so only customers of Talktalk could get help if I’m not mistaken. But, with how they’re performing I guess they’ll be looking to cut costs.
Sods Law – after I wrote my post above I had occasion to contact TT support. It’s probably an issue related to our VDSL connection dropping (We are still on FTTC as my wife wishes to retain our *real* landline).
Ran their automated line tester – it reported an unspecified issue and my account page “knew” about the test result and pointed me to an onscreen button to chat with the support team. The button did not actually do anything, from any browser or device available to me.
So I was forced to ring the dreaded TT support number and wasted 90 fruitless mins of my life before giving up on talking to someone in Africa, who did not listen properly, over mushy VoIP.
This would never have happened with the Community Forum support. I would have expected OpenReach to be on the case before the week was out.
Sorry dear, it’s me or the landline! I will be looking only switching to ISPs with UK based support.
You do realise that your wife’s only keeping a “real” landline because of TalkTalk’s full LLU, and that if you migrate to any other ISP, you’ll have to migrate to VoIP in the process?
Hopefully the current Mrs Oswald will be in agreement with that
As Sipgate do not do residential free plans anymore, see A&A ISP’s offering of VOIP that is cheap. For ease of use simulating a traditional landline, you may need to purchase a new handset like a SIP compatible Siemens Gigaset Cordless, Yealink, Grandstream.
Once you setup the device (config detaisl on A7A site) then you aren’t tied to any particular ISP in the future as will work over most that offer Dynamic IP or Static IP.
Port your existing telephone number over too and keep it.
https://www.aa.net.uk/voice-and-mobile/