Why Internet Forums Are A Cr@p Source of Hong Kong Visa & Immigration Advice
Posted in Employment Visas, Family Visas, Forum Folly, Investment Visas, Long Stay & PR, Refusals & Appeals, Special Programmes, The Hong Kong Visa Geeza, Visitor Visas /
Hong Kong visa forums?
Q – Would you ask a public forum for advice on how to get your teenage daughter off drugs?
Q – Would you ask a public forum for advice on how to answer a tax question from the HK IRD?
Q - Would you ask a public forum about how to make an application to the court to secure custody for your child?
In the main, of course, the answer is no.
You would seek the advice of an expert.
These questions are simply too important to be dealt with via the well meaning but ultimately emperically derived experience of strangers who have no accountability for the advice that they offer up.
The same applies to Hong Kong immigration questions too.
Down the years I have tried to answer a great many Hong Kong visa and immigration questions posed on public forums but mostly the webmasters refuse to post my answers because they contain links to really good advice on our websites.
They are concerned that the quality of our content will direct visitor traffic away from their forums – which is understandable.
However this means that the advice offered up on their websites is of massively variable quality.
There is some shockingly bad advice posted on public forums, but also some accurate advice too.
The problem is, which is which?
Just like advertising, only 50% of it works – it’s just that nobody actually knows which half!
So do Hong Kong visa and immigration public forums actually help?
My response is to provide an alternate opportunity to access expert immigration advice and provide accurate answers via PodCast or otherwise in a video format – also pointing out the folly of some of the suggested answers to the questions posed.
Let’s at least get some quality advice circulating.
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The Hong Kong Visa Geeza (a.k.a Stephen Barnes) is a co-founder of the Hong Kong Visa Centre and author of the Hong Kong Visa Handbook. A law graduate of the London School of Economics, Stephen has been practicing Hong Kong immigration since 1993 and is widely acknowledged as the leading authority on business immigration matters here for the last 24 years.
