Autodesk deletes old forum posts suddenly | Hacker News Reader

Autodesk deletes old forum posts suddenly

forums.autodesk.com

250 pointsnsoonhui170 comments

Urgh, cultural vandalism.

The challenge here is that there are people out there who just do not understand the inherent value of this kind of old content. If any company exists for long enough eventually some of those people will cycle into positions of decision-making authority where they get to "save costs" or "clean things up" by delete-hammering some invaluable artifact like this one.

The correct way to handle this is to add a BIG banner on top of older content like this warning "This post is from 12 years ago, and may no longer reflect the most recent version of our software".

Flattening a bunch of dynamic pages to static HTML can also be useful, if the concern is maintaining old forum software.

This isn't about cost reduction. It's about eliminating any assistance for people who want to continue to use old versions of the software. Adobe is in the cloud/subscription business now, and it wants to make life for people holding on to their local, licensed copies as difficult as possible.

this seems true and explains my inability to locate the plugin tooling for the latest version of Acrobat to develop some local extensions. My next move was to contact Adobe and ask directly where the corresponding SDK is to be downloaded for the latest local version of Acrobat. Sometimes companies give you some internal link that you can't find publicly or can't navigate to from the present version of their website.

Indeed; if this was a profit and not a cost, there's no way they'd've gotten rid of it.

It's not that they don't understand, it's that they don't care, more often than not. Sadly there has been a societal shift in my view that will be hard to reverse, just think of Boeing as an extreme example. We've created incentive structures that not only reward short-sighted decision making, but also created social norms that punish people who try to push for long-term goals or things that are not in one's immediate self-interest. Corporate sees you as a headache for not thinking about nothing but line going up, and your peers will deride you as a fool for not "getting it" and giving up like they have.

Always Be Archiving. Never trust the platform.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/

I'm a big archive team fan but gotta go with the ABC acronym such as "always be collecting" or "always be capturing"

Calm down, Alec Baldwin

Coffee is, indeed, for closers.

* Alec Baldwin, calmdown.

FTFY

Spend half an hour perusing that site and you'll truly see the pathetic state of preservation on the web. Outdated information, an endless list of failed projects... it's a self-referential call to action that documents our collective inaction.

A lot of the failed projects are not really due to inaction on behalf of archivers, but because the website being archived cut off the firehose too early, for example by adding a captcha. Most of the projects that have a page on that wiki have at the very least been added to the Warrior at some point and yielded a significant amount of data that was later uploaded to Internet Archive.

If you preserve "everything," you're sort of asking for a lot of those things to be outdated or no longer relevant. That's sort of the problem and why companies tend not to do so.

When Oracle bought Sun/Solaris, they took down the public Solaris forums which made my job working with illumos forks very difficult without all the years relevant Solaris 10 questions and answers. In that case, it was a naked attempt to force people to license the then new Solaris 11.

Oracle is anti-consumer in a ton of ways, I'm not sure why they have so much money to be able to buy and ruin so many other things.

They sell to people who buy. I realize that sounds like a tautology, but most of us don't buy software (at least, not often) and instead we primarily use software. People who primarily buy software care about and optimize for very different concerns than people who use software. There's a market built around selling a large product, which will be used by many different kinds of users, to just one specific kind of user, one who has been empowered to make organization-wide purchasing decisions. This is typically done by presenting to that kind of user a curated subset of the application's features, that subset usually being wholly disjoint from what most users will see. These software-buyers will be shown a pretty picture taped to an ugly mess, and since it meets their needs (to whatever extent they have needs for it), will decide to buy based on the pretty picture (and, sometimes, the accompanying sweet-talk lunches).

In another generation, the term "nobody got fired for buying IBM" was coined, and this is the kind of people it was talking about. Buying Oracle doesn't create controversy among their peer group.

Oracle's reputation is bad enough that buying it should result in a firing though. At least if it can be avoided. Remember all the unnecessary work they generated throughout the whole industry when they turned the Java license into a extortion trap for unsuspecting companies?

Yeah, I think their reputation isn't what it used to be. But it takes a long time for these things to percolate up from developers and lawyers to management, and another long time for them to spread from IT-focused businesses to other industries.

First-mover advantage (or close to first) has a lot to do with it, I imagine. Ellison has been resting on his laurels for over four decades.

When I build a Javascript compiler, it used a lot of ActiveX interfaces. In the code that used a particular interface, I'd include a link to the Microsoft documentation on it.

One day, all those links went to dead ends.

> Urgh, cultural vandalism.

This was probably intentional. Those posts are no longer available to feed an AI. Now only Autodesk has access to those posts.

People need to understand that the free ride is over. If you aren't hosting or archiving, it's going to disappear.

Why offer knowledge for free if you can offer premium support instead

> Why offer knowledge for free if you can offer premium support instead

Because it is mostly not knowledge, but tips to make their software work.

Ye I hate this. I work with a processor that TI manufactures and a huge part of the "eco system" was referring to a now defunct forum and wiki. It is a mess. At some point they just deleted it and replaced it with nothing. Links to download of tools and libs are broken. And support don't have them. I was just lucky I found them on arhive.org ...

According to some sources, this is what happened to Google Search.

How are these old posts invaluable? Do you think a paywall would have generated enough revenue to pay for serving them? If nobody is willing to pay for access, doesn’t that mean they are in fact not valuable at all?

As an example, when I used to work in embedded development I'd come across some weird undocumented behaviour of a peripheral in a device. Inevitably there'd be a post on a manufacturer-hosted forum where someone else had hit and hopefully solved the same thing. To me at the time these were very valuable, but the actual information was created by the community rather than the manufacturer.

As to who would pay for it, that's a tough one - my employer wasn't willing to. I suppose it acts as a commons

Autodesk made almost 5 billion dollars in 2023. You can host a vBulletin forum with incredibly high traffic for a couple thousand a year. Stop making excuses for shitty companies.

And that forum also provides an enormous amount of value to a company, saving them many multiples of that cost in reduced support expenses.

Deleting this is madness.

> And that forum also provides an enormous amount of value to a company, saving them many multiples of that cost in reduced support expenses.

The calculus has changed a bit. They are losing sales from people using older versions of the software that they wouldn't have provided support for anyways. In Adobe's mindset, for example, Photoshop CS6 is the poison that is holding back subscription sales, not their competitors. So an easy way to frustrate users into subscribing to the latest version... delete the old forum posts!

See I want to say you're right, but also the newer versions have all the same bugs the old ones do.

But the user pays forever with new version! (Some manager wants bonus now)

Not this user! One of my 2024 goals was to get off Adobe, and off I am. And creating hasn't felt this good in years, I shit you not.

I’m not in a field where I use any Adobe software, so asking as a bystander: what did you end up switching to?

Replaced Photoshop with Affinity Photo. I didn't say it was a big goal for me ^^; But yeah. It was an adjustment but I cannot get over how fast AF is compared to PS.

I've gotta say that I love Photo. I'm not a professional and I can't speak to professional needs, but for my own simpler needs, it's so much easier and faster than PS. I imagine that's what happens if you don't have 30 years of users screaming if you change their workflow by a single pixel, and can re-invent UIs based on newer ideas.

Such an insane paperclip optimizing way of thinking. The marginal cost to serve static content is very low as well - if they really didn't want to pay anything they could give it to a third party.

So what is the value of the old forum posts? To whom is it valuable? Is there somebody out there who would be willing to buy it?

In case this isn't trolling, it's valuable to any users who have a question that was previously answered on the forums, and to any users who invested time and energy answering said questions. Neither of these show up as a revenue stream, but instead impact customer retention and onboarding - the absence of community support is a major negative when making a purchasing decision as a new customer.

These things are not monetizable but are foundational to monetizations. It's like office ceiling lights. You might as well forgo buildings and gather naked employees with laptops in parking lots from such perspective.

Things can have value without the need to bring money into the equation.

A paywall would make them useless, because you wouldn't be able to find them using Google.

To give another perspective, from a company perspective, companies are mostly not really in the business of providing an archive. And if you provide a bunch of outdated information--banners flagging it as such or otherwise--you're mostly not doing most people any favors when they encounter that info when doing a search. Most companies pretty aggressively remove info more than a year old or whatever.

Unfortunately the "internet doesn't forget" statement has been false since many years. Most companies couldn't care less about keeping the wealth information they've accumulated accessible.

I remember a few years ago TI got bored with updating their cpuwiki, and deleted the whole this - which stings to this day. The internet is still full of links to it to solve crucial issues, only to be greeted with a disappointing error message.

> Unfortunately the "internet doesn't forget" statement has been false since many years

As a sibling comment says, I think such sentences have meant "you can't rely on the internet to forget". Of course the reverse is also true: "you can't rely on the internet to remember".

In short: don't write things you could regret, but make backups.

Reminds me tangentially of the saying attributed to Mohammed - "Trust in God. But tie your camel first."

I think “the internet doesn’t forget” was not originally intended that way. It is a reminder that it is hard to reliably delete something from the internet. Unrelated to this auto desk issue.

The internet does forget in the sense that stuff goes missing. Just, only stuff that you don’t want to go missing!

It's essentially a law of the internet. Well-researched website on a niche topic written in the 00s? Lost forever. Your edgelord blog from when you were a teenager? Backed up in triplicate.

Now that I think about it, this just looks like a specialization of Murphy's Law

Absolutely. You are screwed either way. It will fall on the wrong side.

WebArchive still has a copy of a website that I made that is just text "John Smith is stupid", with John Smith being a friend of mine from teenage years.

Tbf, if you're lucky, there is web.archive.org and others like it, but yes, situations like those are common and disappointing.

Right, archive.org is very useful if you have a URL, but if you're searching for a question that was answered in a forum, and that forum post no longer exists and no longer shows up in search results, then it's effectively undiscoverable as far as I'm aware.

It amazes me how companies will have free volunteers help people to use their (often expensive) paid subscription products, and then delete all that info those volunteers wrote up. Don't they want people to use their products?! They're less likely to renew their subscription if they struggle or are unable to use the product for their particular use case.

Unaffiliated forums not ran by the company are better in that the company can't decide to just delete all old posts one day (and while the owner could, certain types of unaffiliated forums are usually a bit easier to clone and republish.) The downside is you don't get assistance from people who work for that company, but often you rarely get that in official forums. The usual reason to use official forums is just that they have significantly more users asking and answering questions than unofficial ones.

>that forum post no longer exists and no longer shows up in search results

I dream of someone taking the internet archive data, capping it at 2010 or so, then making a search engine out of it. I mean if AI companies are looking to gobble all the data they can get, then surely they'd jump at the chance to train on (higher quality) data from the past that simply no longer exists on the web. So it'd seem like a win-win situation if IA gave them a copy of the data on the condition that they maintain a permanent backup and provide some sort of searchable index on the data (maybe even via LLM), and in turn the AI companies got access to high quality data on obscure topics that simply no longer exists.

Yup, let's not tie such an important endeavor to AI and AI startups though, we need something robust and lasting :-)

> I dream of someone taking the internet archive data, capping it at 2010 or so, then making a search engine out of it

It sounds like you're describing CommonCrawl.org, and yes, it's already popular with AI companies.

It has became very obvious how reliant we are on Archive.org last time they had an extended outage (remember?, they got hacked,then they couldn't bring the system back up for weeks and weeks). Huge amounts of reference material suddenly dissappeared.

Personally I think it is a huge error we don't force archive.org to allow others to mirror their data easily.

> Personally I think it is a huge error we don't force archive.org to allow others to mirror their data easily.

What do you mean by this? I thought they definitely were open to mirrors, why would ’we’ need to ‘force’ them to anything?

IIRC the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt had a mirror of the web archive up, though they may have failed to maintain it

Probably the real error is in not having a publically funded mirror.

Certainly seems like something that the Library of Congress should be handling.

The problem with this is that there's all kinds of user-generated web content that certain people wouldn't want tax dollars going towards preserving.

I can already look at e.g. the National Film Registry and say I don't care about movies so my tax dollars shouldn't go towards preserving them, regardless of what some bureaucrat thinks is "culturally significant." The film industry has a pretty massive network of artists who are able to go to bat for that stuff, though.

But then take pornography, or hate speech (and/or straight-up misinformation), or content that's illegal in the US but not elsewhere (like drug recipes or weapons schematics). It's already tricky for a private entity to handle convincing people of the value of preserving everything physically and legally possible to preserve. Making an argument for doing it as a public function, even in good faith, could easily turn into a mess-- especially when we can barely agree what should be allowed on the internet now.

It's not like the forbid mirroring. The problem is simply the size of it: around 100 petabytes.

I feel like there should a law about this, but I'm not sure how it would work. Maybe companies should have to at least give a warning before they do it, so Archive Team (or the likes of them) can go into panic mode and archive everything before it gets deleted.

I don’t think the reaction to everything we dislike should be “let’s make it illegal” because you’re going to end up with unintended harms. If companies are forced to retain public information against their will, many will simply opt not to have a public forum.

If anything, governments should be proactively funding organizations that archive content and governments can archive content of significant cultural or historical value like the library of congress does for physical media.

Great! If they don't have a public forum there is no opportunity to do harm, I see no issue here. The community will still ask questions and answers somewhere e.g. in one of Stack Exchange sites which is less likely to be removed and/or forgotten

I do think there should be some kind of law, but it would also have to comply with gdpr Right to be Forgotten.

I don’t think there should be a law requiring companies to keep a forum up. But perhaps it would be nice if we could have a customer protection based requirement to have some sort of customer support, along with acknowledgement that a customer support forum that could go away at any moment doesn’t satisfy that requirement (so either include better customer service or take steps to preserve the community).

I mean we wouldn’t want companies to fall afoul of some law because they had to take their forums down due to some privacy ruining bug in the software. Or because the old forum server sitting in the basement died. Or because the third party software they used for the server went out of business.

> I mean we wouldn’t want companies to fall afoul of some law because they had to take their forums down due to some privacy ruining bug in the software. Or because the old forum server sitting in the basement died. Or because the third party software they used for the server went out of business.

With the exception of maybe a transient bug, isn’t this exactly the point?

“We wouldn’t want a company to run afoul of [data preservation law] because they [neglected maintenance]” seems like the directly incorrect intent. We would want to compel the business to migrate or modernize any hosting to keep it active and viable. If their vendor goes out of business, they should’ve paid more or migrated the data.

If we’re discussing a local club then sure, they’re a victim to hardware failure or business changes, but this thread is full of billion-dollar-businesses. They can spend a few thousand dollars on a forum every few years. When I worked at $FAANG, my service had millions of users and cost like $10K/mo in hosting. Surely the Autodesk forum in read-only mode would cost a much less, and almost nothing if migrated to static HTML.

It's a bad point. Forcing companies to maintain internet forums just because third parties may want the data in them isn't a reasonable thing to legislate.

They (or some other hypothetical company) might have some personally identifiable information (maybe in messages between users) or at least they might not know for sure that they don’t. We could at least imagine a company where the due diligence required to hang on to and continue serving up the info ethically isn’t free.

There are companies that have a forum, but it just seems to be a best-effort mostly community driven thing, or at least it isn’t tied to any paid product. It would be a shame, IMO, if they couldn’t offer that without signing up for some perpetual obligation. Even if it is small, somebody has to have an eye on it.

That's insane overreach.

The web archive already works from the mode that anything can disappear at any time. Anyone who would rush to archive it if it were going offline could have archived it any time over the last N years.

Websites getting shut down no matter the reason is just a part of life that we need to accept. Laws can't address the underlying churn of time. Forums should be easy come easy go, not open you up to litigation if you shut down your own site too quickly. Cmon.

It’s in the AI model now no worries

As someone who used Revit for 5 years before moving to develop and maintain custom Revit API apps full-time, I have many horror stories I could share (feel free to AMA). I can say that the latest version of Revit (R2025) is largely a single-threaded application, and has only just upgraded their back-end from .Net Framework 4.8.1 to .Net8.0. The company continuously and openly takes breathtakingly blatant advantage of their user base and is at worst adversarial to their users. The software captures and exchanges a surprising amount of data during usage (to the point that Revit itself is hard to distinguish between malware by network cybersec software). Autodesk is a walking-talking timebomb of an antitrust suit waiting to happen. With that said, Revit does a lot of things well and there are no realistic alternatives. Personally, I have always found community responses on forums very helpful while autodesk support has ranged from helpful, to useless, to simultaneously counter-productive and insulting. Jeremy Tammik (officially affiliated with Autodesk these days) and his “The Building Coder Blog” is a very nice reference for Revit API and he is somehow EVERYWHERE on the forums.

edit: the open letter posted here by another user does a very good job detailing many broad issues (with Revit in particular); every point it makes is accurate in my experience.

As a follow-up, it is always sad to see large volumes of community-driven content deleted especially when the motives are likely for selfish or nefarious purposes. Being somewhat familiar with the latest releases, Autodesk has been pushing their cloud services (Forge, or whatever they’re calling it this month) and AI. They are probably deleting the content after having fine-tuned an LLM on it and patting themselves on the back for a job well done.

> With that said, Revit does a lot of things well and there are no realistic alternatives.

Vectorworks? Archicad? I'm really only familiar with the former, full disclosure I used to work at Vectorworks, and we certainly considered ourselves a competitor to Revit.

Ok - definitely fair. While I HAVE heard of VW and ArchiCAD, (I suppose I might toss Bently into the mix as well) I don’t have extensive knowledge of these programs. Therefore, take my opinion as just that. However, from my understanding, those others focus more heavily on a CAD-like environment (SketchUp is another common one here) as opposed to “BIM” (where I would define BIM as essentially a database driven type of CAD with OOP bolted on). So in that sense they are certainly suitable for drafting and may compete for the same market share, but are fundamentally different. My use case was from the perspective from an ElecEngineering team operating within an AE firm in the US. I also understand ArchiCAD is more popular outside of the US.

Also I suppose this is part of the issue with “software alternatives” I find most architects by-and-large extremely _discerning_ people, composing an industry where nuance is king. In that sense if the software doesn’t do “exactly what I want, exactly how I want to do it” then it’s tossed aside as “not viable”. This is, in my view, another thing Revit does “well” - it is incredibly opinionated. For better or worse it means if you fight its intended workflow, achieving what you want is difficult or impossible.

On another note, care to share your experience at VW? I’m interested to hear anything you’re willing/able to share about your time there! I know someone on the NXOpen team who has spoken highly of that team/product.

I quite enjoyed my experience at VW! It was (and probably still is) a wonderful place to work. I have frankly never been more productive in my career. My team (and I got the impression that this was also the case for most teams) was very hands-off, just let people work. The employees are grown ups, so if they need to collaborate they can do so in an ad-hoc fashion instead of forcing them to do agile rituals. For most of my time there, I had exactly one scheduled meeting a week, you could call it weekly stand-up, and a lot of ad-hoc collaboration with my teammates.

For people like me, who don't need and frankly chafe against the added structure of most agile methodologies, VW was amazing. I could just put on my headphones and code, and that's pretty much all I ever wanted. I ended up leaving because as much as I loved the workplace, I have pretty much 0 interest in the actual product. CAD is cool, and I like working on professional tools, but I have no interest whatsoever in architecture and design. I still wonder, though, if leaving VW was a mistake. If I ever find myself living in the DC metro, I will certainly reapply.

Wow, sounds awesome! What types of projects did you work on for the platform/product? Since I’ve become very familiar with Revit’s API (and its shortcomings) I often wonder if I should consider a role on the actual Revit dev team helping to improve the actual product itself, but I have never contributed to anything like it. What industry did you land in?

I ended up working mostly on features that architects could use to present projects. Stuff like renders and walkthrough animations of the building.

I've moved from CAD to computer-aided engineering. I work on the backend of a compiler for a DSL for control system engineering. My niche is definitely professional tools programming. I'm quite happy where I am right now, but if something ever happened with this job, my preference would be to pivot to another professional tool. I've always thought something like a DAW or 3D modeling software would be fun to work on.

Oddly enough I remember Vectorworks and Archicad were (are) owned by the same company but were fiercely competitive.

Also, hello fellow former Nemetschek coworker .

maybe folks 'in the industry' have heard of those, but revit is the one people outside the industry have heard of.

I was suprised parent had not heard of them as someone who used Revit for 5 years.

The internet, or dare I say it, Information Technology itself, has not yet come to proper terms with Time Context as an implicit aspect of data. Much information is not static, but rather is a growing or changing development from year-to-year.

Using today's generic tools to search for digital information relevant to a specific version or time period of anything is very ad-hoc, hit-and-miss. And we're only a mere few decades in. I think the time context of data is going to become increasingly important and valuable.

Having been involved in creating content and deciding whether it should be retired or not, it really isn't about the money. Product docs can be locked to versions and archived pretty well; most sensible people understand the docs for 1.0 may not apply to version 3.0. But there are a ton of things on a company website that don't really apply to the here and now and will be increasingly out of date. And, if you just leave everything accessible forever, it pollutes the current information.

I get that some people prefer everything is just left online but it gets harder and harder for all the folks who just want info that's fairly current.

You can explicitly move old content to an archive and put big banners on it that it doesn't reflect current information. MS does an OK job of making it obvious that you're looking at documentation for an older product, for example.

As I wrote, product documentation is versioned anyway so that's fairly straightforward. But a ton of other stuff is variably still relevant and can get in the way of finding what's most relevant and accurate for today.

Whenever I would go to update something older, it would invariably take me longer than I planned because even things that were not flat-out wrong often didn't reflect current thinking, terminology, usage, etc.

In addition to what's most relevant and accurate for today, past context is also important; knowledge accrues. In computing we are used to fast technological redundancy, surfing the cutting edge of technology, where the greatest commercial relevance is.

But one of my hobbies is vintage or retro computing, and something everybody in this hobby realises sooner or later is how much of an ordeal it is to collate even 20-year-old internet information. And that's in a digital interest area! Now do the same for news or the detail of recent history. Pick an issue and follow it's thread through internet history, year-to-year. It should be easy, shouldn't it? The reality is, half the sources aren't even dated. If we were designing an internet future, the ability to step back through time, in terms of digital information, would be a huge boon for humanity. Because, as critically important as it may be!, today is still only today.

I don't really disagree.

The way search evolved, it never had much of an explicit temporal component--probably because it didn't matter much early on. But now we have a situation where companies legitimately don't want old results polluting newer (usually more relevant to most people) results.

Does Autodesk have any remaining users that actually _enjoy_ being their customer? Their CAD software is unstable and painful (just try installing it...); architects resent their stewardship of Revit[1] and so on.

This seems like an existential risk to the company if something better comes along. Sure, they have massive lock-in, but these things don't last forever. Remember when we all thought that Microsoft Office file formats guaranteed an eternal monopoly?

[1] https://the-nordic-letter.com/

If you think Autodesk is bad, try their competition.

Paid competiting software from companies like Dassault are even more locked down and free software alternatives don’t even come close in feature parity.

Autodesk can do this because it’s been 40 years, a lot of people have tried, and somehow they all manage to make something worse.

I find Rhino3D to be a pretty good antithesis to AutoDesk.

The company behind it is employee owned and been around since the ‘90s.

Subscription-free, single payment, and they actually support older versions of their software.

One nice part of their license is if you buy the student version, there is no restriction on you continuing to use that license commercially, in perpetuity.

Software for the construction industry is uniformly terrible, Autodesk and Trimble are the big players and I’d be grateful if someone disrupted them.

There is a small amount of good construction software, Procore (project and document management) and Bluebeam (amazing pdf editor) are wonderful tools but the estimating software I use by Trimble is awful. Inconsistent UI, they use their own custom GUI elements instead of the built in Windows GUI elements, unclear interfaces, every UI/UX crime is present in it.

Autodesk isn’t going anywhere tho, basically every architect/engineer uses it (in commercial construction).

If you are a GC looking for an alternative project management software that is easy to use, modern, and fairly priced, consider https://constructable.ai (full transparency, I'm one of the co-founders).

Everything being said about existing software in this post very much resonates with what we learned talking to hundreds of GCs. We want to change this.

Fusion 360 is getting worse and costs more every year. Now they just emailed that the early renewal discount will also no longer be available.

Sadly FreeCAD is just not there where it needs to be to be a good alternative.

I switched to FreeCAD 2-3 years ago. It suits me just fine and I'm so glad I can store my project in a local folder. I also don't have to worry Fusion360 taking any more features away or locking me out. I also don't have to beg them to renew my licence every year.

FreeCAD has improved a lot recently.

MangoJelly has also done massive work creating thorough video tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_yh_S31R9g&list=PLWuyJLVUNt...

Fusion turned a corner recently imo. They added the ability to reference driven dimensions in formulas, which makes fully parametric designs trivial. I seem to never get hung calculations or crashes anymore.

I use fusion 360 several times a week, but I'm not quite able to follow what you said. Can you provide an example or a link to where they announced this feature?

https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/blog/october-20....

Fusion is my daily driver and this is a huge thing for me. Missed it. Thanks.

I tried FreeCAD earlier this year but I nearly pulled my hair out trying to move a hole in a design after the hole was created. This is a much easier task in Autodesk. I am not sure I am a huge fan of the UI design choices that FreeCAD has made.

Businesses have pipelines entirely relying on Autodesk tools & formats.

> but these things don't last forever. Remember when we all thought that Microsoft Office file formats guaranteed an eternal monopoly?

It will last long enough for Autodesk. The real issue being why Autodesk was allowed to basically buy most of its main competitors in the 3D/CAD authoring tool space without any push back from government agencies.

> The real issue being why Autodesk was allowed to basically buy most of its main competitors in the 3D/CAD authoring tool space without any push back from government agencies.

That's not even remotely true. There's Dassault/Catia, Siemens/NX, PTC/Creo, and probably a dozen (or more) niche competitors.

The real problem is massive vendor lock-in. Each CAD company goes out of their way to have crappy interop with the others.

John Walker the founder would grieve as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer)

He was a digital hoarder sharer. See:

https://fourmilab.ch/

just nabbed his midi to csv gadgets! seems like an awesome guy!

algolia has done the same for their discourse forum, moved everything to discord and removed all old posts.

Upon asking this was a response from the team: "The Discourse content is no longer available. Much of it was 5+ years old and no longer reflected current SDKs and APIs. We're glad to help you here."

https://ibb.co/3htkxjv https://discord.com/channels/1171089640443367494/12783186879...

people were unhappy obviously. I really don't understand this decision by them.

Also, why would anyone want to use Discord as a forum? It's horrible, not easily searchable, and you need a proprietary app. Nothing good about it.

I'm shocked so many companies use Discord for official purposes.

> I'm shocked so many companies use Discord for official purposes.

Going back in time you can replace it with: Discourse, forums, website, IRC.

New generations of devs / manager decide to use "the current tool" to connect with their users. Too bad they also think it a good idea to nuke the older channels.

This time, the "current tool" doesn't allow searching via the web. Most discord forums I'm on are basically black holes in which questions keep getting repeated.

Exactly, it doesn't even help the owners themselves, because people will keep asking the same things over and over again. It's not like a forum where you can easily search by topic.

The owners do not care as much, because they're not the ones who answer the questions - a cadre of "volunteers" do.

I’ve launched projects that became bigger and discord is just kind of expected when building from the ground up and great for corralling a community

I mentally categorize larger established organizations as something different

but logically I can’t really see the difference, so I understand why

I also understand the negatives of that particular platform for getting information efficiently

but I understand why they do it

Expected by who? Plenty of big projects don’t have a discord.

You can just use the website.

Edit: It's <<Discourse>>, not <<Discord>>.

Edit 2: Oh, they moved from Discourse to Discord :-)) That is just messed up.

You can use your web browser, as well.

It is still shitty as well. UI/UX are terrible.

It’s about the same as the desktop app. It doesn’t feel like a web app. The desktop app is better because it doesn’t feel out of place.

It’s not a bad UI/UX IMO, but it can take some getting used to. For the notifications I have to check several options such as “silence @everyone and @here”. Sometimes I find the updates annoying. But it’s among the best chat UIs I’ve tried.

It's definitely good UX for a chat app. It was good UX from the beginning, when they had a dark mode before a light mode and made voice chat not require installing anything (which was many peoples' first real-world exposure to WebRTC technology).

It's poor UX for a support forum where you want communication to be one-to-many as much as possible (to spread info to the largest number of people with the smallest amount of info producer effort as possible).

How about the new forum style channels?

Those actually are bad UX, imo. In the servers I've seen implement them, they devolve into basically chat anyway. People still re-ask questions because the search functionality is the same as searching chat, which people weren't doing before. The layout still favors short messages over in-depth posts.

(I do find Discourse to be among the worst web forum software, and I can see similarities between Discourse and the Discord forum-style channels, so some of this may come down to personal preference. Discourse always felt too recency-biased and ephemeral to me compared to e.g. MyBB or phpBB, for example.)

Keep in mind also that it's still behind the walled garden of Discord's authentication and hosting. Imagine if you had to install the Tapatalk app to actually access any InvisionFree/ZetaBoards/Tapatalk/etc forums back in the day. It was annoying enough that mobile users were nagged to, but it would've been unthinkable to require desktop users to. (And being able to launch the app in your browser, while removing friction to "installation," isn't the same thing as actually being on the web-- search engines can't index Discord channels, Discord messages don't have human-readable URLs to share elsewhere, etc.)

Edit: Also, very relevantly to this thread, you can't just grab a webpage snapshot to archive a Discord channel like you could with forum threads. You've got to either take a screenshot (while dealing with scrolling) or scrape the data via the API, being careful not to trip bot protections or violate ToS, and then figure out how to present it separately.

Chat is a poor replacement for forums.

It feels like an electron app, which I would argue IS bad UI/UX.

Subjectively it doesn’t feel like one to me.

I definitely understand it. I have some really old blog posts with tutorials for a deprecated version of my software and I get a lot of people complaining about things not working based on those. I've had to add disclaimers to the most popular ones.

That's pretty messed up. Maybe they don't deserve the honor of being HN's search engine anymore.

Isn’t there a fancy LLM ai out there that is suited to ingesting a local knowledge base and create excerpts with links to the original source?

Yuck!

ArchiveTeam (https://wiki.archiveteam.org/) fairly routinely makes archival blitzes on dying forums. If there's any forewarning of such on a forum you frequent, let them know.

If only they were around when my old hangout, www.wota.com, was alive :(

How does the public access ArchiveTeam's archives?

They send everything to archive.org and the data is eventually included in the Wayback Machine.

Fun fact: the official announcement of this policy (https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/community-announcements/commu...) is not even reachable via a Google search.

> We encourage you to create a new thread about the same topic. It will help maintain the conversation while also resurfacing it on our boards to continue the conversation.

Ohh god. Always surprises me how people building stuff for the internet completely dont understand the internet.

You're wrong. We're wrong. Sanctioning behaviors idiots do as official makes things more approachable. It doesn't matter that not doing things elitist ways wreck productivity because output quantity nor quality no longer matter but how strongly one is aligned with zeitgeist do as if we're living in a Soviet Russian shoestring factory. It sucks.

Possibly just hadn't been indexed yet, looks fine:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fforums....

The user's own .sig says it all: "Everything will work just as you expect it to, unless your expectations are incorrect."

It's Autodesk, a company of skunks. You knew who they were when you signed up with them and gave them money. They did just what anyone who was paying attention would have expected of them.

Removing those content will make user experience worse and make AutoDesk harder to use (or learn on your own). Just let it (autodesk) die.

Show me a tool that’s more entrenched and for good reasons than autodesk’s CAD… I’ll accept Photoshop, but can not think of anything else

I am in two minds. All discussion about old old AutoCAD versions is more clutter than value. But discussions about profiles or lisp routines are not.

Fun fact: In 2008, Autodesk acquired the competing and highly regarded Softimage, even though it already owned two 3D applications (3ds Max and Maya), only to shut it down six years later.

What a stupid and ridiculous thing to do in 2024. The budget overhead of storage, serving, traffic, bulletin-board software maintenance and moderation is negligible for a company like Autodesk.

This is likely the idea of some idiot middle-management clown that had to show "progress" and "impact" to their own management in order to get a performance bonus.

Oh god, Autodesk. I tried to see if I could pay for education support because Fusion 360 account setup is unbelievably buggy, but no cigar.

They have the worst installer and registration process in all of history. I really wish we could find an alternative - even willing to pay!

My kid wanted to learn 3d modeling, she is in middle school, and under than 12, according to their licensing, no luck as the kid needs to be over 14.

Support was pointless ("education license is not for commercial use" ). Off we went on blender.

Back in the day I heard an argument "Photshop and 3DS MAX are so easy to pirate because the companies want the kids to learn these tools, so that later as adult professionals they'll pay license for using them", but if that's no longer true, then good riddance

Good choice!

I’ve been going through the same thing. Take a look at Onshape, it’s also free for education. I haven’t had a chance to check it out myself yet but I hear good things.

OnShape has replaced Fusion360 for most of my needs, and it's free for personal use.

Just the other day I created a fusion 360 account which also seems free for personal use? The CAD space is quite confusing

Free for now, under ever more restrictive conditions.

Yeah, but they have an education license we must use. We can’t use a personal account. Also, kids must be 13 and over. Good luck first year high schoolers!

Is this motivated by the value of the text (for internal use, or selling it), or about to launch some new "AI-powered" support thing, or by the headache of dealing with data scrapers pounding their servers, or something else?

This is likely due to legal reasons. I remember some child protection law where many forums decided to shut down rather than be legally and financially liable for breaking these laws.

I wonder if this had anything to do with the increased LLM traffic to forums that I thought there had been a post about recently.

Many don’t realize that the internet is a series of tubes connected to computers that are in the process of breaking.

Real hackers Memento Mori

Autodesk deserves to be poster child for enshitification.

A few weeks ago I found a video that allowed me to work around a bug in Inventor 2025 that has existed for 20 years… the video was a grainy screen capture from a Windows 97 machine!

And each year I pay more for a product that gets worse.

We have both an AutoCAD subscription and a perpetual license for the 2010 version. We couldn't install the 2010 version anymore because they shut down their activation server.

Should be already archived by archive.org?

Sure, but you can't search for the forum pages on archive.org as far as I'm aware (or at least as easily as searching on Autodesk's website or Google/Bing/etc.) For the time being, old forum posts will likely still show up in search engine search results, and you can take those URLs and look them up on archive.org.

Eventually though they'll likely no longer show up whenever the search engine's crawlers revisit and it's a redirect, in which case the pages are undiscoverable.

Data is oil.

When does the UK forum responsibility law take effect?

that's why i'm writing my own cad software, dingcad at dingcad.com

it will be free and open source

It needed curation pretty bad. There is no shortage of people who ask and answer questions. The relevant knowledge will resurface as needed. I just hope they manage outdated information better in the future.

Has anybody identified the decision-maker responsible?

Hopefully it's only a single individual who is now confirmed to be completely unsuitable for any future decision-making whatsoever.

Without doing as much of a root-cause analysis as possible, people will not even be aware where the deficiency arose and there may be no protection going forward from such below-average performance.

Decision-making is not for just anybody, I think it's obvious if you don't nip faultiness in the bud it could get even worse and spread to other companies.

Even some companies which were high-integrity to begin with, as we have seen.

Archiving is probably a more accurate description, the content is likely still there somewhere but can no longer be adversarially web crawled.

No, deletion is the accurate description. Some links that are still available on Google search ( eg: try this query "https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+unit+test++civil+3d" and look for the posts that are> 10 year old) are no longer accessible; when you click on them you will be directed to the main forum page.

I think they were insinuating, with no basis, that Autodesk is for some reason keeping the removed posts in their own offline/intranet backup. They could've also been thrown off by the PR speak the Autodesk employee who announced this used, in which they called it "archiving" but also said "we cannot keep the content" (https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/community-announcements/commu...).

Just because you can't see something doesn't mean it isn't still there somewhere.

If you are looking for something and it isn't where you last found it, you usually wouldn't assume it's "gone".

Yeah, maybe for you it's as good as deleted. But I suspect Autodesk retained 100% of this data for subsequent machine learning application. And I think for you to say it's deleted, how are you going to prove there are no copies?

>> And I think for you to say it's deleted, how are you going to prove there are no copies?

This is really an astonishing question ( claim?). If going by your definition then no one is capable of proving that any Internet contents have been deleted. "Deletion" becomes a meaningless word.

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