[01-07-2025] Community Modernization - Communications, Updates & Discussions

[Tarek_K]

Hi all,

as discussed in the previous topic here we wanted to start a new thread to keep everything sorted and clean, so it is easier to follow and helps transparency. 

Overall, you will find in this topic community identified issues or improvements asks listed, which can be provided either as a post through this topic, or through the feedback form (or both if you want, but then please be so kind as to indicate in the post that you also submitted the feedback form). If you are reporting things here in the thread please make sure to provide a clear description of the behavior or issue, with screenshots (full browser screen, please, as this is always better) or video to help understand what you see and why to be able to reproduce.

In addition to that, you will find here the consecutive list of all blog posts linked when it comes to platform updates around the community! We also will keep editing this topic with new blog posts released for convenience having it all in one place 🙂 

Navigable list of community issues or improvements mentioned including status:

Listing of all the blog-post regarding updates to the community and modernization in order oldest to newest:

• Community Redesign - Updates Since Launch - 12/06/24
• Community Redesign – New Releases & Office Hours Recap For This Week. – 12/12/24
• Community Redesign – Final office hours for the year – 12/20/24
• Community Redesign – Modernizing the Autodesk Forums – 01/10/25
• Community Redesign - February Release - 02/11/25
• Community Redesign - Update on Progress for Reported Issues - 04/04/25
• Community Redesign - April Release: Industry Hubs are live! - 05/07/25
• Community Redesign - May Release: We´re making important behind-the-scenes updates to the Autodesk C...
• Community Redesign - May Release: Migration Updates and what to expect this week - 05/22/25
• Community Redesign - May Release: Final Migration Round and what to expect this week - 05/28/25
  
• Community Redesign - June Release: Upcoming Improvements to the Community Experience - 06/26/25

Additional Notes:

Also, people you will see engaging with you in this thread will be @CGBenner and myself @Tarek_K. So please feel free to add us if there is something super urgent or elements you want to highlight. We are also highly proficient community users, but dont have the ability to fix things on the fly (where we can we will. :D) but we make sure that internally all goes into the right venue, will be looked at and discussed so you will see elements mentioned in the update blog-posts and also in the updated list above. 

So, let´s keep this new thread a single source of truth for the discussion moving forward - all from the old topic you should see reflected in the list, which we regularly update. 

If you have questions, or you think I should add something to this post let me know! 🙂 Thanks a lot for your support, patience, understanding and working together! 

[kerry_w_brown]

@Tarek_K ,
Regarding The List Item 3: You have completely missed the point of the post discussion. 
My reference to  'fat finger room' was simply a warning about placing icons or artifacts that act as buttons too close together, and only applied to mobile and tablet users.
That discussion was related to a possible design layout changes to perhaps make the forum topic listing more readable.
From memory the issue only applied to the replies icon, which does not need to be a link anyway as the topic name serves as the link to  to the replies. 

//=====
For interests sake, which of the 134 items listed are still valid and which 7 do you think are the most important for the everyday users of the forums ?

Regards,

[CGBenner]

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@kerry_w_brown wrote:

@Tarek_K ,
Regarding The List Item 3: You have completely missed the point of the post discussion. 
My reference to  'fat finger room' was simply a warning about placing icons or artifacts that act as buttons too close together, and only applied to mobile and tablet users.

---

@kerry_w_brown Thank you for clarifying what you meant on this item.  I think most people in the US would understand the term "fat finger", but several members of the team who are not US based may not quite get it.  As I have abnormally large thumbs (or it feels like it sometimes) I totally get your frustration on mobile devices.

  I'll work with Tarek to get that specific feedback added to the list for the Product team so they have it when they look at this item.

I'll let @Tarek_K answer part 2 of your question if he has any thoughts on that part. 
Have a great day!

[Cadguru42]

#34 about the excessive scrolling required to even see posts is marked as "Improved", but it's actually worse.

This is the ACC forum as I see it on my standard monitor. 

It takes 8 scrolls of the mouse wheel (3 lines for each scroll) just to see the first two posts because now there's not just one huge unrelated banner, now there's two giant ones.

As a side note, just to get to the ACC forums was confusing. I was coming from the C3D forum and clicked on the Architecture, Engineering & Construction link thinking it'd show up there. Couldn't find it. 

So I had to click on Home, scroll down and look at what forums were listed, which ACC wasn't listed. So then I clicked on the Show More button then scrolled yet again to finally find the ACC forum. 

Navigation of the forums is more difficult with this "upgrade" that's still buggy. Is no one working on the forum updates actually using the forums? How does this increase productivity or help the users get to the info they want better than the previous iteration? 

[Tarek_K]

Hi @Cadguru42 ,

I wanted to follow up on your feedback and provide some further details on your points to start with, but I definitely hear you. Overall, the ACC Community is unique in that we have both the Autodesk Community forums and the Big Room as platforms, with the Big Room providing more industry-specific opportunities for AEC professionals, whereas the forums focus on the question, answer, help, and feedback aspect.

The intent originally was to connect AEC professionals on the Community to the Big Room and vice versa, which was implemented, I think over a year ago, to provide more opportunities to network and engage. When you are signed in to the Big Room and the Autodesk Community, the 'banner' updates and displays content from the Big Room on the ACC Community. 

I admit that having two banners now in this forum is suboptimal when it comes to scrolling down to be fair. I raised this internally for the UX teams to be aware of and to address this, which is reflected in the line item #130. Also, I can see why the improvements mentioned in #34 have not become apparent, due to showing two banners in this very specific place only. 

Also to address your second point, the navigation in the header through the breadcrumb structure should bring you to this page where under this point you can see all forums, including ACC / Civil 3D, every AEC specific one. So, you are saying it was easier for you to navigate back to the home and navigate form there vs using the possibility on the AEC page? Just checking, as this might be an interesting point to bring internally. 

@kerry_w_brown - sorry for missing the point to be fair, but as not being English native speaker this was definitely some cultural slip as Chris explained I guess.

So actually I brought in all functional impairments which I could reproduce to the internal teams to consider first, which are elements like text editor, the coding issues, but also usability elements like floated topics, jumping to the latest post, etc. and basically everything that prevents someone from using some function in the community fully. What I am doing is trying to bring all your voices internally in way that makes common sense from a long term community user perspective, that elements are improved or fixed like that. 

Hope that answers the questions here! 🙂 

[Cadguru42]

@Tarek_K it's not just the ACC forum with the excessive scrolling issue. That one's worse because of two banners, but the others have not been improved either. Autodesk added the giant "Let there be anything" banner that has nothing related to Civil 3D on it's forum page as well. I'm assuming all of the forums have this. The spacing issue that was slightly improved was completely wiped out and made worse when this banner was added.

If I go to a forum I expect to see posts. You don't even see posts when you go to a forum anymore.

As for the navigation issue, this is what I see when I click on the way-to-long name of Architecture, Engineering & Construction. 

The first time I did this I scroll down and still didn't see anything about ACC. I scrolled back up and noticed a tiny arrow above the images and clicked it. 

Still no ACC forum listed. If I click the tiny See all button it ends up being the first one listed.

Either doing it this way or the way I did it before is still a lot of user interactions required to get to a forum compared to how it was before the changes. This is not an improvement and turns off many people from using the site.