Community Redesign – Modernizing the Autodesk Forums - Feedback

[CGBenner]

[06/26/2025]

Post to the latest blog on the release this week

[06/11/2025]

Post to the latest blog on the release this week

[05/30/2025]

Post to the latest shareout of the listing of elements found / solved

Blog post to the latest announcement of the final migration round on the community

[5/15/2025]

The latest blog post is live and covers everything on the behind-the-scenes updates that are happening.

[5/7/2025]

The April Release Blog post is now live with updates on the Industry Hubs and more.
________________________________________________________________________________________

[Blog link in original post updated 3/6/2025]

Clarification as requested - 2/14/2025:  Any feedback in this forum thread that does not directly say that a feedback form has been submitted, and even some that does, is being captured and logged for the team to look into.  We may not respond directly to each post but we will add a "Like" to the post to indicate that we have seen and logged it.  If we have anything meaningful that we can add at the moment, we will reply with that.  If we do not reply, it means that we simply don't have anything to add to that request at the time.  We are adding links to the posts that we submit, and giving details on which individual post the team should look at, as well as including any images you share.  We do not have a way to add videos to the feedback form, but these are still welcome and appreciated, and we make a note of it on the form when we submit it so the team knows to look for the video.  Thank you!

Hello Community! 
 
As you can see from this recent blog post on our Autodesk Community Blog, the Autodesk Community Forums will soon be getting a new look and feel.  This new look is part of our efforts to modernize the community and place key resources where you can more easily find them. 
 
Some of you have had an early look at these updates during our recent A/B testing across the community. We extend our sincere thanks to everyone who shared their feedback during this phase. Your insights and comments have been instrumental in refining this design.  Here are some of the changes you will see: 

• Updated Forums experience: Enhanced navigation, optimized mobile experience, new threaded posts and the ability to upvote content. 

• Recommended content: Explore new content sections featuring suggested blog posts, events, and additional resources tailored to your interests.  

• Recognition for top contributors: Visual recognition to help you get to know the most active members in the community. 

• Changes based on your A/B test feedback: We’ve made several updates based on your valuable feedback detailed in the Product News posts on our Autodesk Community Blog.  

We would love to continue to hear your feedback on this redesign, so we have created a feedback form, which you can bookmark for future use, to report any issues or suggestions that you have. 
 
For more details on this release, I invite you to read the full blog post on our Community Blog. 

Thank you all for being a part of this Community! 

[ChrisRS]

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@Curtis_Waguespack wrote:

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@ChrisRS wrote: I have self-nominated myself for a "Curmudgeon Badge" but have yet to be awarded one.

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@ChrisRS, I acknowledge your feedback and have taken action to implement your request. Here's your badge. 

see community improvement team, this isn't so hard 😂

 

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Hazah! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! You are a God!

I am willing to share;
It needs to be a Self-Nomination!

[Simon_Weel]

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My apologies for not posting a thank you reply for all of these, I really was just thinking of not adding to the posts in this thread. 

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I think you miss the point? The people responsible for the forums specifically asked for feedback about the new design. The result is a lot of well-overthought ideas and remarks. People spent time on the subject. Humans work like this: if you specifically ask people to come up with ideas, the ones giving an answer expect at least some kind of acknowledgement of their contribution. That could be a simple one line message like "thank you for your feedback". Then you know your contribution didn't end in a black hole.

Without response, you leave people dangling. They don't like that. And worse, the next time you ask for feedback, they'll probably dismiss your question.

I guess the team used some kind of tool to scrape the feedback topic, so they know who submitted something. Compiling a list of e-mail addresses of all contributors isn't rocket science. As is sending an e-mail using the address lists as BCC.

If you want feedback but are unable or unwilling to respond to each contribution, then either make it very clear there won't be a response or don't ask for feedback at all - you'll get it anyway....

[Curtis_Waguespack]

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@Simon_Weel wrote:

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If you want feedback but are unable or unwilling to respond to each contribution...

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I don't think they have recognized or accepted that they are using about the least effective feedback system that can be used. This was pointed out to them last week on a different forum when they introduced the new feedback form, but I don't think they still understand.

The current "black hole" type approach to feedback is problematic for users and developers and is known to create a disconnect that ends up with results that are what developers wanted, or what the developers imagined the the user wanted,  or what the developers thought they understood the users wanted, etc. It does not lend itself to achieving the best result of what the users need and want. And in fact it bakes in obstacles that preclude the best result.

Additionally, because their B candidate of the A/B test was so regressed from the existing A version of the product, they inadvertently overwhelmed themselves with an avalanche of feedback. The feedback system they had in place originally was pretty much nothing. Just community managers running around to all the forums trying to find and log feedback as complaint threads popped up. It's pretty clear that there was just some very inexperienced people behind the scenes that did not understand how far off the mark the B candidate of the A/B test really was, and did not anticipate the resulting feedback.

The feedback "solution" when they rolled out this release is just using a survey tool to create a form for feedback collection. While better than the non existent system of the A/B test, this is still woefully inadequate, and puts the developers in an extremely disadvantageous place from which to be able to understand and execute on the needs and wants of the community of users. 

To compound the problem, it's pretty clear the development of this update has a separate agenda, and that the user feedback is being generally handled as a second thought to that. There are a lot of problems with this modernization effort, and the feedback strategies being used are in no way helping resolve any of it. I don't think they have even truly come to terms with or understood that they have released a regressed version of the existing forums as an "improvement update" or what the implications and outcomes of having done so are. 

Often, what will happen in this situation is that the product development team will at some point begin to find justification for clearing out feedback logs and marking things as "not feasible", "not enough information", "unactionable request", etc. As the pressure to reduce the backlog mounts, development teams will convince themselves that user feedback is not important or not useful or whatever, just to be able to dig out from under it. The whole project gets mired with little to no notable improvement for the customer/user, and eventually time and money run out, and the project is advanced to the next phase, and users and developers are left to work with a really bad base product, which subsequently gets built upon further, often repeating the same sins.

Yep, unfortunately I've been involved with a couple of $h!tshow projects earlier in my career, and this one has all the same hallmarks and smells very familiar.

But what do we know, huh? 

[Curtis_Waguespack]

Bug:

Sometimes when I post a reply the little link button does not show up and I need to refresh to make it appear

 

 

[Cadguru42]

When you click the Reply button for a post the Report, Thumbs Up and link icon get moved leftward and the Reply button just disappears.

The focus doesn't change to the text input box and doesn't scroll to the reply box. If you accidently double click on Reply you immediately get sent to the Report post page. Locations of inputs/interactions should not change when a user clicks on it unless the context is changing. This is basic UI design stuff that I learned 25 years ago, but Autodesk seems to have forgotten.

EDIT: Seems like the focus and cursor scrolling issue is not static. It happens sometimes and other times it doesn't. Not sure what triggers the difference. But why should I spend the time beta testing Autodesk's forced changes when they've had a minimum of 60 days to work on it that we know of?

[nbonnett-murphy]

This redesign makes the forums almost unreadable. There is so much empty space on the page that I have to scroll twice as far to see half the information. The information density is next to nothing. I know this was brought up many times during community feedback. As it's going, the post deletions and usability regressions have made this forum a last choice for me when I'm searching for information. Not sure if that was the objective or not but it's frustrating as a customer.

It would be amazing if some enterprising user would make a tampermonkey script to compress the text back to a usable density.

[Curtis_Waguespack]

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@nbonnett-murphy wrote:

It would be amazing if some enterprising user would make a tampermonkey script to compress the text back to a usable density.

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edit: oops I was unfamiliar with Tampermonkey as a product/extension and didn't recognize that as a tool when reading your post, I just thought it was a clever way to describe a script hack

It will be a bit more DIY than what you mention, but you can use do your own CSS edits to accomplish this if you would like to take that on. See this link for an example:  https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/community-announcements/community-redesign-modernizing-the-autodesk-f...

[Curtis_Waguespack]

Bug: I've tried several times to link to pendean's post in this thread using the copy link button and every time it only takes me to the top of that page

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/community-announcements/community-redesign-modernizing-the-autodesk-f...

[Curtis_Waguespack]

Bug: 
Link button did not show up when replying again:  

Actually, this seems quite reproducible in that if I edit this post and the click the Post button, the link button vanishes until I refresh

[kerry_w_brown]

@CGBenner 

Bug

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/user/myprofilepage/tab/user-preferences%3Alinear-format

Jump to First unread post in Topic is not functional.

 

Stay Well,

[kacper.suchomski]

Thanks. I didn't know that.

I usually suggested in the comment that the user should create a query in the appropriate board and I called via @ Chris Mitchell to change the status of the attitudes to implemented.

[istan]

Ok. I'm leaving. Maybe in 20 Years I come back when they re-invent NNTP..

[ActivistInvestor]

While it may not be high on your list of priorities, I just thought you'd like to know that Your discussion group interface is completely unusable on an Android phone (Android 14 + Chrome), and barely-usable on a 12" Android tablet with plenty of screen real estate.

If you'd like a screenshot illustrating that horror-show, I'll be happy to oblige.

[etfrench]

Clicking on the bell icon takes you to the last message posted instead of the last message read.

[kerry_w_brown]

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@etfrench wrote:

Clicking on the bell icon takes you to the last message posted instead of the last message read.

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Thats interesting, mine takes me to 'Forum Activity and Notifications'

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/notificationfeed/page

stay well,

[kerry_w_brown]

@CGBenner et al

While the wheels are off this beast and it's guts are accessable :-

    How about providing an option for the time to be expressed in the System default, in my case ISO 24 hr clock ??

    Surely conforming to international standards is a worthy goal.

    Our individual system data ( or timezone ) has to be read anyway to format the time displayed on posts.

Stay well,

[etfrench]

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@kerry_w_brown wrote:

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@etfrench wrote:

Clicking on the bell icon takes you to the last message posted instead of the last message read.

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Thats interesting, mine takes me to 'Forum Activity and Notifications'

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/notificationfeed/page

stay well,

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Sorry, clicking on one of the messages takes you to the last message.

[kerry_w_brown]

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@etfrench wrote:

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Sorry, clicking on one of the messages takes you to the last message.

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You're seeing different functionality than me ??
Ed, perhaps wait for @CGBenner for comment. 

Stay well,

[Brock_Olly]

My 2 cents:

1.
More compact overview (or atleast a toggle option to compact the view) so you can see more posts at once.

2.
Less whitespace in a thread

3. 

Who uses tags? I feel like this can be way smaller or somewhere else because I don't see a use for this functionality.

4.
These forums are mainly community-driven, top contributers are all the way at the bottom, I feel like they deserve to be on the right hand side like they used to be. This might seem silly but I think they do deserve a spotlight, maybe where the 'related tags' are now? 😉

5.
Most bugs Curtis has mentioned like chatbox etc definitely need to be fixed.

[Brock_Olly]

Created a small mock-up of what I mean with compact view.
Also would be nice to add a date to latest reply like in previous version.