Autodesk partially restores old forum posts

> I just don’t understand why they shut them down in the first place. They couldn’t have cost much to keep running. They provide a huge amount of value in the form of free support for their products. What am I missing?

Businesses are actually pretty stupid, and often make decisions based on narrow and parochial criteria without considering important factors and externalities (from the decision maker's perspective).

For instance, we've had our internal corporate wiki (or wiki equivalent) nuked on several occasions, with little to no supported migration path. The nuking is presented as an "opportunity" to "clean up," and I get the impression they're result of cost-saving migrations (e.g. cancel contract with one intranet provider, because a better deal was to be had with another). I don't think the "owner" of the intranet understands it as anything more than an announcement board and a place for storing FAQs.

The result is we've lost a lot of documentation for apps that at the time of the nuking weren't supported by an engaged and future-thinking developer, who was unwilling to put in the thankless and unfunded legwork to migrate documentation thoroughly. Those apps still need to be supported, it just becomes harder to do it properly.

> They couldn’t have cost much to keep running.

It cost at the very least the salary of a software engineer, though most likely a lot more. Autodesk is not some passion project of a group of volunteers who just want to keep it up. At large companies, I have seen few models of how to run public facing legacy services that don’t “align” with the company any more and as a result there is very little interest in them. They are all expensive in terms of personal and always a potential PR disaster to manage. Doubly so if it’s something that requires moderation like a forum.

You have the “there is a dedicated team for ‘legacy stuff’. They just inherit all dead end projects in the company”. If you are gonna have that model, that teams scope is ever growing, and so is their size. It’s not a shiny job either. “I maintain projects no one cares about” is not interesting or shiny and most good people will move to something else.

There is also the “since you started it, you own it now” approach. Where the virtual team that started a service, will sort of own it forever. It’s this thing that just hover over a team’s shoulder forever. Though “forever” usually means until a manager comes along who is loud enough about not wanting to deal with that shit anymore. It only causes issues when things go down, break, need updating, etc and they don’t want to work on that anymore.

There is the “the ownership of this random ass service will fall wherever we randomly draw and redraw random organizational lines. It’ll keep forever bouncing between random teams as no one cares about it, and no one wants it, and everyone argues that “it actually belong in fabric because it’s the only remaining consumer of their v2 APIs”, “fabric thinks this is more business layer because its main audience are end customers”, “business unit thinks it’s actually more UX as it’s running on the same domain”

And there is always the looming PR issue when an eventual issue happens, a ton of infighting over the lack of clear ownership and once they are over that, the person who has to fix it has no idea what this thing is and needs to get up to speed. Then you get a post on top of HN or Reddit or twitter etc saying “{Insert multimillion/billion dollar company random service} has been down for a week” and a lot of people like “seriously, they can’t figure out how to run that? I run one just for my ham group and it never goes down”

Why bother is usually the final approach.

As I understand it, they only deleted old threads. So, you're right, it was providing free support, but only for old versions of their software, so they didn't make any money out of that. The theory is, if people struggle with those then they might be pushed towards their newer versions (where forum threads haven't been deleted) and so they have to pay up.

I'm not an Autodesk user (of any version) but this seems more plausible to me than LLM experiments or hosting costs.

Probably something related to LLMs. The LLMs picking up outdated info, them trying to hoard the data. Who knows, but it smells of something LLM related.

Embarrassment at discussions of bugs from 2007 that are still not fixed.

(For clarification, I doubt that is really the (main) reason, but longstanding bugs in CAD systems are definitely a thing, and I guarantee there are bugs that old in Inventor (and its main competitor Solidworks), and probably older still ones in AutoCAD).

The most pessimistic theory is that Autodesk has been using the forum posts to train an AI that they intend to put into their products as a paid add-on. No incentive to pay for it if there is free of cost forum available.

Be on the lookout for an AI-summarized review of discussions on forums. Then the review is put on top, and the thread is hidden. Then the thread is "archived", inaccessible, and lost.

As a matter of fact, why is this not a trend?

Someone wanted to save a couple hundred bucks per month to get a bullet point in their promo case

Honestly I'd be more surprised if they had been truly deleted forever.

Depends on what exactly you want to do, but there's a reason why these vendors can afford to charge so much while being so user-hostile.

I think the only "real" option is FreeCAD.

OpenSCAD makes you "code" your model instead of drawing it. There's a learning curve associated with every CAD software but I don't think you'll achieve a reasonable speed with this one even if you do put in the effort.

Blender is great for "freehand" modeling but awful if you want "real CAD" with accurate measurements, parametric modelling, constraints etc. - there may be plugins to make it somewhat work.

Onshape is free as in beer for hobbyist use but locks you into their platform and there currently doesn't seem to be a usable CAM solution yet, at least none that could deal with metal - if you want that for free, I think Fusion 360 (Autodesk, heavy lockin and serious restrictions on the free version) is your only realistic option.