I will be airing my own views on the Autodesk discussion group changes in a future post. In the meantime, I have collected some reactions from other users. For the record, there has been only a little censorship in this area. Here are some of the comments that made it through unhindered:

• I’ve given it a fair shake and it’s just as bad as I imagined
• Goodbye, people. It was nice while it lasted
• it sucks
• it doesn’t look like you have any intention to meet the expectations of these people
• not [as] much traffic as there was before the change.  I hope things improve
• I’m sure you’ve noticed the sourness many folks are having with this interface
• What a f’in f-up
• This is so aggravating that I am resorting to posting questions that may have already been answered vs. trying to find them via the search tool
• Very annoying
• We use NNTP because it’s easy and fast, and better
• very slow, compared to “other” html forums
• This was hyped as a “state-of-art web experience”. It is clearly not
• Extremely slow compared to the previous web forum
• we are screwed with this interface
• This is like having your high performance vehicle (NNTP) stolen and having to take the bus to get to your destination
• 4 days later, still sucks
• Still very slow, cumbersome, difficult to track and navigate, unintuitive
• It took me literally 30 seconds to get that smiley to insert
• I really was expecting something better
• I see too many people who may not be around anymore. In most cases their expertise far outweighs any improvements to the forums
• Welcome to the new and improved Autodesk forum brought to you by high school students near you
• You keep using that word [“upgrade”]. I do not think it means what you think it means
• Better? Wanna bet? It’s cumbersome, at best
• Another annoying thing here is that I can’t seem to find a way to show threading
• Very, VERRRY slow, compared to forums using PHP and the like
• Why even have an edit feature at all, when it’s virtually useless?
• the “experts” are being alienated and having a harder time contributing to aid the beginners
• I don’t like reading this forum in a browser. NNTP was and is much better
• This sucks
• about 40 unanswerable questions that have popped up in the first 30 (wasted) minutes of trying to “give it a chance”
• If we aren’t going to get our newsgroups back at least attempt to make this forum professional
• Sorry folks but I just don’t have the time to log in and browse thru all the different pages required now
• Map 3d is “losing” its best contributor because of a dumb forum update
• Autodesk prove again if something works  they will find something to make wrong
• I stopped posting here after the change for the same reasons.  Just logged in for this
• since the demise of the NNTP feed I rarely visit several of the forums I used to watch
• It is just too time consuming now. This is really discouraging
• I cannot be nearly as productive as I could with a newsreader…it takes no less than 4-5x longer
• getting rid of the NNTP server was one of the worst things Autodesk has done in years
• Goodbye
• your update and support policy really force me into alternatives to Autodesk

That’s going down well, then. To be fair, there have been a few people who are relatively supportive of at least some of the changes. As usual with any unpopular change, there are a couple of asinine comments attacking the critics as just a bunch of old whiners who are resistant to all change. But the selection of comments above reflects the overwhelming negative sentiment, and that’s from those people who bothered to stick around long enough to make their views known.

I would have thought Autodesk would have learned its lesson after the well-deserved thrashing it got the last time round, but apparently not.