Community Content Archiving | Announcement and FAQ

[Tiana_Y]

Hi Everyone, 

To keep our community efficient and up to date, we'll be archiving content older than 10 years. We built a policy around document retention to stay relevant to our users and customers. 

We'll archive outdated content from forums, idea boards, and other community areas across all products and industries. Rest assured, we've set up procedures to preserve important ideas and discussions. Below are some frequently asked questions. 

Q: When will the archiving process begin? 
A: The archiving process will start in December and is planned to be completed before the end of the year.  

Q: Will the archiving affect community stats or individual profile achievements? 
A: No, the archiving process will not impact community stats or individual profile achievements. All profile stats, ranks, and badges will remain unchanged. 

Q: Is the archiving based on the creation date or the latest activity date? 
A: Archiving is based on the creation date of the idea or forum thread. The latest activity does not affect the archiving process. All replies and comments within a topic being archived will also be archived. 

Q: What if there is a helpful post or thread I would like to keep?
A: Unfortunately, we cannot keep the content.  We encourage you to create a new thread about the same topic. It will help maintain the conversation while also resurfacing it on our boards to continue the conversation.

If you would like to keep older content for yourself, you can save it locally to your own machine via screenshots or save it as a PDF file.Thank you for your cooperation and support as we improve our community platforms.

Thank you for your cooperation and support as we improve our community platforms.

Best,

The Autodesk Community Team 

[andrewpuller3811]

Why does Autodesk think this is a good option?

Autocad has been around for how long?

Civil 3d has been around since 2006 i believe.

Issues that have been in the Civil 3d since it was introduced are still problems today and the solutions that were provided more than 10 years ago are still relevant.

[pendean]

@andrewpuller3811 Perhaps it's the number of posts and links they have to maintain and wish to keep alive and available and service, plus all the removed-users (every notice everyone in those old posts now has the same Anonymous user name)?

For example, your reply is number...

13,193,482 (over 13-million, it was significantly less only a few years back)

But... I'd be curious to find out too what the impetuous behind this decision was (and why only 10-years).

[Curtis_Waguespack]

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@pendean wrote:

But... I'd be curious to find out too what the impetuous behind this decision was (and why only 10-years).

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@pendean, you're not curious about why they are only giving people a few weeks notice 😉  

Conspiracy Theory 1:

Some suggest it's related to forum performance and the new forum design update... basically the dev team can't make things run faster, so they're chucking anything that's not bolted down in a desperate attempt to gain some speed. The timing seems to align with this. 

Conspiracy Theory 2:

It's aliens... it's always aliens. 👽 👽 👽

For the official word on this though: 

@Tiana_Y , as a general courtesy to the community of users this impacts, can you please elaborate on the vague wording of this announcement, and explain what you did elsewhere (assuming you are legally allowed to do so here). Thank you.

[ActivistInvestor]

Why would any reasonable-minded person believe that deleting a thread like this one is not squarely detrimental to the interests of all customers? I only needed to spend a couple of minutes to find that one. I could find and show you thousands more if I had the time. 

The thread linked to above very clearly shows that the date a thread was started doesn't necessarily have anything to do with its relevance to current product versions or its informational value.

A 100-year flood is one that happens on the average of once every 100 years. I would call what you are intending to do a "100-year bad idea". 

[ActivistInvestor]

I think it's pretty clear at this point that it has something to do with AI. 

[Curtis_Waguespack]

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@ActivistInvestor wrote:

I think it's pretty clear at this point that it has something to do with AI. 

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From an AI legal standpoint I think you're right. I came to that conclusion today after Tiana_Y offered a few more details elsewhere, but I don't know that I'm allowed to repeat those publicly. Hopefully she'll update the original message tomorrow with more details.

[james.mcmillanNYR6A]

When I archive something, I usually mean put it out of the way because it's not current but I might want to refer to it for some reason.

Is this the case here, or would it be more relevant to use the term deleting?

[MattH_Work]

Don't delete, MOVE

[ActivistInvestor]

What I would like to know is, does the dev team know how to filter Topics by the date of the most recent activity. That information is displayed for each topic when you view the topic list. 

[teixeiranh]

What exactly do you mean by archive? Close the thread and move it somewhere else? If so, no problem. 

If you intend to delete the most precious threads of the community, with all the shared knowledge to be gone baby gone, then a special place on hell  is reserved for you, no doubt about that lol

can't believe you are actually considering evaporating this online gold. Ludicrous.  

[pendean]

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@Curtis_Waguespack wrote:

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@pendean, you're not curious about why they are only giving people a few weeks notice 😉  

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Not really, they've always behaved like that around here, nothing new there. It existed in their "announcements" forum for a few days before the banner showed up, so I am surprised it went so public before the axe dropped.

[Tiana_Y]

Hi All -

I understand the concerns and questions raised regarding the archiving process. This action is in accordance with our internal information management policy, so we must move forward with it. The team has thoroughly reviewed the data and established criteria for content that is still helpful to our customers. We will repurpose or recreate that content before it is archived. 

Thank you, 

Tiana