Visual LISP, AutoLISP and General Customization
686 Views, 52 Replies
On June 4, Autodesk is upgrading the technology behind our discussion groups. The result is a significant improvement to posting & replying, navigation, search and other features. While we launch this upgrade, the discussion groups will be unavailable from 3pm (PDT) Thursday, June 3 and Friday June 4.
As part of the upgrade, Autodesk has taken the decision to discontinue the time-honored use of the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP). This was a difficult and bittersweet decision, given the company’s past investments to maintain NNTP, but one necessary to continue providing the state-of-art web experience Autodesk customers have come to expect. For active NNTP users, we know this will change your workflow when using the forums. To help transition to the web-based forums, the new updates include a simpler, more intuitive interface to post and reply, bookmarking and e-mail notification features to track favorite posts, and more powerful search tools. While not a substitute for the NNTP experience, the streamlined capabilities of our RSS feeds also provide an enhanced and alternative offline forum reading experience.
Autodesk is excited about this change, and is confident that all the valued users of our discussion groups will quickly appreciate and benefit from the improvements to this web experience.
Eric Wright
Product Manager – Support & Learning
Web & eBusiness
Autodesk, Inc.
Eric Wright
Sr. Web Product Manager
Autodesk Knowledge Network
Autodesk, Inc.
As part of the upgrade, Autodesk has taken the decision to discontinue the time-honored use of the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP). This was a difficult and bittersweet decision, given the company’s past investments to maintain NNTP, but one necessary to continue providing the state-of-art web experience Autodesk customers have come to expect. For active NNTP users, we know this will change your workflow when using the forums. To help transition to the web-based forums, the new updates include a simpler, more intuitive interface to post and reply, bookmarking and e-mail notification features to track favorite posts, and more powerful search tools. While not a substitute for the NNTP experience, the streamlined capabilities of our RSS feeds also provide an enhanced and alternative offline forum reading experience.
Autodesk is excited about this change, and is confident that all the valued users of our discussion groups will quickly appreciate and benefit from the improvements to this web experience.
Eric Wright
Product Manager – Support & Learning
Web & eBusiness
Autodesk, Inc.
Eric Wright
Sr. Web Product Manager
Autodesk Knowledge Network
Autodesk, Inc.
I am at least willing to try out the new website interface before passing judgment on whether the touted state-of-the-art changes actually *are* improvements, and/or whether the improvements compensate for the loss of the Newsreader option. I would hope others will do the same -- maybe they'll find themselves able to use it in place of the Newsreader approach; maybe not.
It would be admirable if you could introduce the improved website interface *before* eliminating the Newsreader option, leave them overlapping for a while, and let people compare them and respond. It would be even more admirable if you could reconsider whether to go through with the elimination, based on the reaction.
But since I don't think it's likely the decision to limit the forum to website access only will be reversed, as a result of all the negative reaction so far, and since I hope this thread at least has AutoDesk's ear, I will put in my request that you fix a problem of which I've seen no acknowledgment that AutoDesk is even aware, despite its being talked about repeatedly here.
Please, if it's not already one of the anticipated improvements, make the website capable of handling pairs of angle brackets without deleting them and everything between them. [Sometimes it doesn't happen exactly like that. For instance, sometimes it seems the angle brackets and a double-quote character between them remain, and everything else disappears (though it doesn't survive that way when passed along in a reply), and today there was one posting where I think it didn't have the problem at all. But I haven't been able to discern under what conditions it's different.]
Given:
1. the purpose of this forum, and
2. that so many postings here include AutoLisp code, and
3. that angle brackets are so commonly used around defaults in (get...) function prompts, simply to emulate native AutoCAD command prompt defaults,
it is laughable that one can't post code like that without risk of its having parts missing as others find it on the website. Just in the last day or two there has been yet another instance of someone copying and pasting code from postings, and having it not work for them because of exactly that issue.
Fixing that would be at least bring it closer to "state of the art" for a forum like this.
--
Kent Cooper
It would be admirable if you could introduce the improved website interface *before* eliminating the Newsreader option, leave them overlapping for a while, and let people compare them and respond. It would be even more admirable if you could reconsider whether to go through with the elimination, based on the reaction.
But since I don't think it's likely the decision to limit the forum to website access only will be reversed, as a result of all the negative reaction so far, and since I hope this thread at least has AutoDesk's ear, I will put in my request that you fix a problem of which I've seen no acknowledgment that AutoDesk is even aware, despite its being talked about repeatedly here.
Please, if it's not already one of the anticipated improvements, make the website capable of handling pairs of angle brackets without deleting them and everything between them. [Sometimes it doesn't happen exactly like that. For instance, sometimes it seems the angle brackets and a double-quote character between them remain, and everything else disappears (though it doesn't survive that way when passed along in a reply), and today there was one posting where I think it didn't have the problem at all. But I haven't been able to discern under what conditions it's different.]
Given:
1. the purpose of this forum, and
2. that so many postings here include AutoLisp code, and
3. that angle brackets are so commonly used around defaults in (get...) function prompts, simply to emulate native AutoCAD command prompt defaults,
it is laughable that one can't post code like that without risk of its having parts missing as others find it on the website. Just in the last day or two there has been yet another instance of someone copying and pasting code from postings, and having it not work for them because of exactly that issue.
Fixing that would be at least bring it closer to "state of the art" for a forum like this.
--
Kent Cooper
