Tag Archives: Discussion groups

Autodesk forums return – what do you think?

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Congratulations to the tech team behind the Autodesk forum software for getting the redesigned forums back up well ahead of schedule!

The new forums look very different. My first impression is that it is a standard-issue Autodesk “progression” – it looks prettier but doesn’t work nearly as well. Huge swathes of screen space are wasted for graphic impact (no, I don’t mean the long-dead Autodesk attempt at PowerPoint). Big fonts, huge header, even bigger footer, lots of pretty white space. Yet what is there contains less useful information. On a 1920 x 1200 monitor, I can only see four threads within a forum before I need to start scrolling:

What I can’t see is if there have been any new posts since my last visit. To do that, I have to enter each thread and do a lot of scrolling (again, because of the highly inefficient information-to-screen-space ratio) to get to the end, then try to remember whether or not I had already read the last few posts. I can’t even just hit [End] because that gives me this:

How efficient is that? Signal to noise ratio: 0%. Compared with the old forum where I could see the headers for a whole bunch of threads and scan the number-of-new-posts column in a second or so, I now have many minutes of clicking, scrolling and frustration ahead of me. Like I have nothing better to do. Every click counts, remember.

Typical Autodesk. Marketing appeal over user efficiency, every time. All sizzle, no steak.

What do you think? Have your say here, on the Community Feedback forum, and/or even on dear Autodesk.

What to do while the forums are down, dear Autodesk?

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In common with most online services, the Autodesk forums are down for maintenance from time to time. That will be happening this weekend:

Announcement: The forums will be unavailable starting 1 p.m. on Friday, April 6 (Pacific time) while we implement the forum redesign. We will be back online at 9 a.m. on Monday, April 9, or sooner.

I really wish Autodesk would act like a company with an international focus and use universally understood time standards for its announcements. Allow me to translate for those people outside North America for whom “Pacific time” means nothing.

Pacific Time (UTC-7) UTC
Off line: 1 PM, 6 April 8 PM (20:00), 6 April
On line (latest): 9 AM, 9 April 4 PM (16:00), 9 April

So, what to do if you have something you want to say when the forums are down? R.K. McSwain has already made some suggestions: CADTutor, AUGI and The Swamp. I have one further suggestion:

dear Autodesk

This new forum is an experiment of mine, aimed at providing a place where people can provide feedback to Autodesk with minimal restrictions. I made an attempt at setting up dear Autodesk nearly a decade ago but the technology (Pligg) I used was not up to handling the vast amount of spam and hacker attempts it attracted, so I closed it in early 2009.

Now I’m trying again using a different format and different technology (a conventional MyBB forum).

Disclaimers:

  • The site is, of course, not owned or operated by Autodesk, a fact which is made clear on the site in several places
  • This experiment might also fail, for the same or different reasons
  • The technology I’m using is new to me and it might break due to my lack of experience with it or reasons beyond my control
  • A couple of days ago, attempts to register were generating database errors; this appears to be fixed now, but it may recur
  • There is no guarantee that Autodesk people will read the forums (although some did last time)
  • There is no guarantee that Autodesk will act on any of the feedback, suggestions or wishes made on the site (or anywhere else)

Last time I tried this, I didn’t let on that I was behind it. This may have been a mistake, but I did this because I didn’t want the site to be seen as mine. The idea was to allow a community to develop which could freely express itself, not one which was led or prompted by any individual, myself included.

This time I’m doing things differently in several ways, and one of those ways is to be completely transparent about who’s behind it. I still don’t want it to be “my site”, though. I’d like it to be a community’s home. If you are interested in trying to help form that community, please register on the site. The front page has instructions.

If you run into trouble registering or using the site and can’t communicate that via the site itself, feel free to let me know here.

Right now, the site is a blank canvas. Paint away.

Chat to Autodesk about being pushed onto rental

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I’ll post later about Autodesk’s oft–predicted–here but just-announced plan to use price increases to push you out of your perpetual licenses, and the execrable spin being used to sell it.

This post is just to let you know that Autodesk has kindly provided a forum in which you can discuss this issue. Why not wander over there and have your say? Autodesk is deaf and blind on this subject so it won’t make a difference, but at least you might feel better to have your say and let others know they’re not alone.

Here’s the link to the Moving to Subscription forum. Here’s the welcome message.

Hot tip: keep a text copy of what you have to say. If, as happened before, Autodesk gets heavy with the censorship scissors and slices through your statement, you can repost it here as a comment.

It’s worth noting that Autodesk did this talk-to-us-about-the-changes thing earlier with the Perpetual License Changes forum. Good luck discovering that forum now without that link; it was merged/hidden/made read-only/whatever. So if you want your view on this subject to stand a better chance of long-term visibility, you might want to repost it here anyway.

Here’s an early thread, This is crappy. Here’s another one, Autodesks new policy Forcing perpetual license holders to subscriptions stinks! There are other threads popping up in other forums, which I expect might get collected up and moved to the new forum.

Magic vanishing images

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In a thread in the Feedback & Questions about the Discussion Groups section of the Autodesk discussion groups, somebody called ACADuser contributed what I thought was a highly amusing bar graph as a test image. Inspired by this, I contributed a couple of test images of my own.

A few hours later, the whole thread magically disappeared! It seems a shame that I went to the effort of making those images, and all for nothing. The handful of people who would have seen them on the discussion groups have now missed out on the experience. So I’ve decided to make up for that by posting them here, where thousands of people can look at them instead.

Here’s the first one (not that amusing):

Discussion group upgrade poll results

Here’s the second one. Given the circumstances, it seems somewhat prescient:

Clue train pie graph

If ACADuser wants to get in touch, I’ll be quite happy to post his image too.

Autodesk discussion group changes – user reaction

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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.

Censorship on the Autodesk discussion groups

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The Autodesk discussion groups have quite a few problems at the moment, which I will discuss at length in future. One unnecessary problem that has been added to the mix is censorship. Having praised Autodesk in the past for allowing discussion to go unhindered, it’s only fair to slam heavy-handed moderation when I see it.

Before I get started, let me just say that Autodesk is entitled to moderate its discussion groups as it sees fit. The forum belongs to Autodesk and it can do what it likes with it. But just because Autodesk can censor its forums, that doesn’t mean it’s always a good idea to do so. Neither does that it mean that Autodesk is immune to public criticism of that censorship. There is no First Amendment obligation on Autodesk, but there are many other places that censored viewpoints can be repeated. Here, for example.

In this particular case, a section was deleted from a reply I made in a thread about the educational plot stamp. In that section, I mentioned that the educational plot stamp is very easy to remove with an everyday AutoCAD command. I didn’t name that command or give any details of how to use it to remove the stamp.

Now I understand that Autodesk gets the twitches when people discuss circumvention of its educational stamp “virus”, but I didn’t mention anything that isn’t already public knowledge. I discussed this issue at length in Cadalyst some five years ago, again without giving away the details. If you really want to know the details, please don’t ask me because I won’t reply. Google it, it’s out there. You probably don’t even need to do that. It’s a pretty obvious thing to attempt. It was, in fact, the very first thing I tried when I first saw an example of an infected file. It worked perfectly.

Back to the censorship. My post was edited, and I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t contacted about it, so it was not possible to have a reasoned discussion about it with the moderator (as I have done in the past on the AUGI forums and elsewhere). Annoyed, I made a further post, this one objecting to the censorship. In that post, among other things, I pointed out that the Autodesk position on the plot stamp was fictional. Here is what the Autodesk knowledge base item TS63668 (which I can no longer find) had to say on the subject:

Issue
When you plot a drawing that was created in or that contains drawing data that was created in the Educational (Student and Faculty) version of AutoCAD® or AutoCAD-based software, the following plot stamp or watermark appears in the plot:

For Educational Use Only

Solution

There is no way to circumvent the plot stamp. This is as designed to discourage the commercial use of an educational version of an AutoCAD product. Autodesk sells educational versions of software on the premise that the software will be used for educational purposes only.

The statement above in italics is a blatant lie. Hopefully, the knowledge base item is now missing because somebody sensible at Autodesk decided that it’s not a good look to have such fraudulent nonsense on its site, dishonestly masquerading as technical support. Or maybe it’s not missing but I can’t find it because the search engine is bad. After all, Autodesk really, really sucks at search. Perhaps it should buy a search engine company?

I digress; back to the censorship issue again. My post objecting to the first censorship was deleted. I was not contacted to discuss this deletion. I made another post objecting to the second censorship of my objection to the first censorship. This post made no reference whatsoever to the plot stamp issue itself. This post was deleted, too. In a surprise development, I was not contacted to discuss this deletion. Three levels of censorship to cover up an Autodesk lie. I can’t see a problem with that, can you? Except for this:

The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. — John Gilmore

Discussion_Admin, you were entirely within your rights to perform this censorship. Your moderation guidelines may even require it. But as a result, my statement about the plot stamp being easily removed has been read by a much larger number of people. So it really wasn’t such a good idea to censor it, was it?

Readers, if you have your own Autodesk censorship tales to tell, feel free to tell them here. It should be a fun read.

Autodesk discussion group update – what do you think?

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On 4 June 2010, Autodesk turned off NNTP access to its discussion groups as part of the process of updating its software to use a different engine (the new one is from Lithium – here are its own forums). I am preparing a large post about what I think of the new web interface, but for now let’s hear from you on that subject. Please vote in the poll on the right, and add your comments once you’ve had a chance to put the “state-of-the-art web experience Autodesk customers have come to expect” through its paces.

In related news, I have now closed the short-lived poll about the end of NNTP access to these groups. The results were:

Should Autodesk shut down NNTP access to its discussion groups?
Yes (8.8%, 5 Votes)
No (59.6%, 34 Votes)
Don’t care (31.6%, 18 Votes)
Total Voters: 57

This is a small sample and must have some self-selection bias, in that those who cared about this move were more likely to read my post on the subject and vote about it. I attempted to temper this by including a “Don’t care” option, but some bias is still bound to be there. There is also likely to be some bias in the opposite direction, because people are less inclined to bother voting to try to fight a decision that had clearly already been set in concrete and which was never going to change.

That said, it does seem remarkable that only 5 people could be found who supported Autodesk’s decision to drop NNTP access. According to my long-running What is your relationship to Autodesk? poll, There are at least 25 (claimed) Autodesk employees who are active enough on this blog to respond to its polls! Without wishing to compromise the private nature of my polls, I can reveal that the 5 Yes votes included Autodesk employees and at least one non-Autodesk person (that’s as specific as I will ever get). There did not appear to be any attempt to distort the voting from either camp. I mention this because the survey mentioned in my previous post was disrupted in this way.