Update on Archiving | Idea Boards and Forums

[Tiana_Y]

Hi All-  

We are excited to share some important updates regarding Archiving and our Idea Boards and Forums that aim to enhance your experience and ensure valuable content remains accessible. Please read the details below to understand how these changes might impact you.

• Idea Boards:  Great news! Our Idea Boards won’t be subject to archival. This means they will not be archived under the current or future policies. However, our product teams will review and process any content that is not feasible and still label ideas by status as ‘archived’. This also means our Product Teams will actively update Idea statuses and move content that is not an idea or simply a very old, archived idea out of the Idea Boards to the correct destinations e.g. product forum for a question. 
• Forums:  We're also making changes to our Forums when it comes to our archiving process. Moving forward Accepted Solutions, along with their parent topics and all related posts, will not be archived as long as they are relevant, e.g. product still exists. This means you could support the community in great way, by making sure when you receive a solution, accept in your thread, or remind original poster of the importance of marking solutions if their questions are answered. We are also looking into whether, with these changes, there is a way to bring certain topics with an accepted solution back from the archive retrospectively. While we can't guarantee the restoration of all archived content due to technical limitations, we are committed to finding the best possible solution to bring the most relevant topics with accepted solutions from the archival. 

We hope that these changes and updates will help us keep content that you as our community find impactful and helpful. Thank you for all of your patience and understanding as we have been navigating the best possible solution to move forward, listening to your feedback and comments.

Thanks a lot!  

Tiana 

[soonhui]

It's a small step in a right direction, we need to salute Autodesk for making one such baby step at a time, after so much outcry from so many users. 

But still, I don't think archiving ( read: removing) some-- or any-- old posts is a great idea at all. What happens if the old posts that are not archived make references to posts that are? Then we still will have broken links and the users won't be getting all the necessary context and help. 

It is mentioned in other post that the initial focus is on bring back API forum posts, but why not the "operation" forum posts? Again, if Autodesk simply removes old posts why should users invest any effort at all in helping others? To me the operation help is every bit as useful as API help and I've used both. 

Further question: why is it so difficult to bring back old archived topic? And if it's really technically difficult, why make such a hasty decision in the first place, knowing very well that it could be irreversible?

[Chad-Smith]

Credit where it's due, these sound like acceptable terms. Thank you for listening. 👏

Regarding the uncertainty around whether already archived post can be restored, it's unfortunate that this happened without at least some consultation with the community. Hopefully this is a lesson learnt for the future.

[pcrawley]

I would have far more respect for a “we made a mistake” post. Dressing it up as something “exciting” is just adds insult to injury.

Thank you for listening.

Remember that actions speak louder than words - we’re looking forward to seeing some undeleted posts. 

[nige106]

It's a common sense approach. Good Luck defining "relevant" though.

[kerry_w_brown]

Regarding code  & API concept  posts [ explicitly in the .NET forum ]

I believe relying on "Solved" criteria is a mistake.
There were deleted posts  that were not marked as solved

and posted from (now) expired accounts

I was only able to save 19 threads before the deletion, but they contain names like  :

Albert Szilvasy

Tony Tanzillo

Frank Oquendo

Owen Wengerd

and I didn't get past 2005-07-06

Surely the decade of posts could be restored into a read-only archive that could be searched and perused.

. . . admittedly, a few of the posts are a waste of space but you shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I don't know how many threads were deleted.

I do know they represent the efforts of a lot of talented people attempting to make sense of the AutoCAD .NET API in it's infancy and the majority of it is still relevant.

A lot of us have links to posts that are now dead.

Stay well,

[pball]

I agree with the others that relying on accepted solutions to determine if a thread should be saved or brought back is a bad idea. In the coding forums specifically everything should be brought back. I would be all for all threads older than 5 or some years be set to read only. The number of people resurrecting 10+ year old posts with a barely related question or worse just ad spam is a bit annoying.

I am happy that the powers at be are willing to undo some changes to support the users that keep the forum alive and useful.

[Curtis_Waguespack]

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@pcrawley wrote:

I would have far more respect for a “we made a mistake” post. Dressing it up as something “exciting” is just adds insult to injury.

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@CGBenner, @Tarek_K 

please take pcrawley's comment here to heart, and take this back to your teams of community managers.

You as communicators must learn to "read the room" better.

Because the actions of the last several months have been so disruptive and harmful to the users and user experience, we as users have grown very weary of hearing how much your teams "care" and are "passionate" about your users, and in this case how "excited" you are, etc. 

I think we as users understand that as a team you are kind of "scared of your own shadows" due to legal concerns and are timid about saying too much or saying the wrong thing, but you must do better on this, and make your words more than "fluff".

I really appreciate that there was finally public communication on this archiving issue, after the seemingly arrogant way that the conversation was blocked and questions were coldly ignored, but I implore you to consider communications in terms of:

• delivering the information the reader expects and anticipates
• doing so in a timely manner ( bad news does not get better with age)
• matching the tone to the severity of the situation
• ensuring that messaging reaches users that have expressed concerns and questions in threads throughout the community and they are given more effort than a just an announcement that they are likely to never see, because no one is really in the habit of looking at this board for information.

[MKE_Howard]

Hi, it honestly feels a bit like when the government announces cuts in different areas healthcare, education, culture, and after all the complaints, they’re like, "We’re excited to announce we’re not cutting everything, but we’ll only keep what we think is the most relevant, without really considering how it affects people."

Like others have said, that’s exactly how I feel about Autodesk’s recent announcement. They’re "excited" to change their plan after everyone tore it apart. But instead of owning up to it and saying, "Yeah, we messed up, sorry about that," they’re acting like they’re doing us a huge favor with some half-hearted tweaks. The criteria they’re using to decide which posts stay are questionable at best, and it feels like they’re just trying to fix the problem without really fixing it. They’ve already shown they don’t know what’s actually relevant to the community.

It’s frustrating because it would’ve been way better if they just admitted the mistake and apologized instead of trying to spin it like it’s good news.

That said, it’s a start. Thanks to the team for making some changes, but I really hope future decisions are thought out more carefully and actually take what the community needs into account.

[Tiana_Y]

Hi All - Just as a quick update, we have taken our first action today to move some of the highly trafficked posts back to their respective boards. We had to do this manually, so some posts may send out notifications to those subscribed to the boards it is being moved to. Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Best,

Tiana

[pcrawley]

Good news.  Thank you.

We do appreciate your efforts to rectify the situation - honestly - even if it was a painful manual exercise, thank you. 

I guess that despite the opening post on this thread, the "data deletion policy" has been torn up and re-written.  Speaking for myself, I can't remember a time where I've witnessed so much passionate negativity on these forums.  But deleting the work the very people who make the forums what they are - and then refusing to discuss it, left many with little option but become the very forum-trolls we all despise.  Unfortunately, we have no other voice (that Autodesk can hear), so please accept this as recognition and appreciation of your efforts to fix what you broke.

[Tiana_Y]

Hi All, 

Thank you all for your responses on this thread, especially the kind words. I hope you all see by now that we take things to heart and try our best to communicate. I would like to address some of the comments about the “fluff” in our communications. Overall, we aim to be positive, helpful, and welcoming – as quoted from the Rules and Etiquette Guidelines, which we all are expected to follow as part of the community. We keep a certain level of professionalism, even when the conversation topics may be difficult. I understand that directness is also important, but remember that we focus on maintaining a safe, healthy, and collaborative community. I understand and recognize that adding “fluff” to communications is not always the best way to communicate, but we try to remain positive. We are still people on the other end. We care about the community, and we try the best we can to communicate and change outcomes for you all. So yes, saying we are excited may not have been the best adjective to use, but for us as a Community Team, we were excited to let you all know that your voices were heard, not just by us, and they made actionable changes.

That being said, we are still looking into whether, with these changes, there is a feasible way to retrospectively bring topics with an accepted solution back from the archive. We are focusing on API and Code discussion first, but it is not limited only to those topics. @soonhui mentioned other topics; we will be looking into others, too, but are currently focusing first on API/Codes topics. We manually brought back the highly trafficked posts that were initially being kept for recreation; there were ~700 posts that went back to their respective product boards. I cannot promise what will be returned, but we are taking steps.  

We will ensure we keep responding to this thread and post any updates we receive.  

Thanks,  

Tiana

[Curtis_Waguespack]

@Tiana_Y , thank you for that update, that information is much more meaningful and better matches the expectations of those following this issue.

As for the communication, again it's all about reading the room and matching the level of severity and sincerity. Messaging can be positive, without coming across as insincere. Often when we try to force positivity into a message it can inflame a situation rather than help it. For instance when addressing someone that has expressed frustration, closing with "Have a great day!" can undermine the sincerity of the message, even if we were truly wishing the person a great day.

With the recent string of disruptive events introduced by both this archiving and the modernization project, the communication has been consistently off the mark, and in both projects user input has been ignored. I think everyone recognizes the lack of public acknowledgement concerning the mistakes that have been made with these projects, and I would encourage you and your teammates to recognize that it is because of the lack of acknowledgement, that forced positivity will come across much more insincere to your audience than it is intended. Ideally as pcrawley mentioned, a "we made a mistake" communication would be extended, and that simple acknowledgement would help ease the tension and allow things to move on. But I think we all know that no such acknowledgement is going to happen, and we know why.

Nonetheless, I think the way forward will be through corrective action first, and then timely, informative, and well distributed communication about the corrective measures, as directly as possible to those who have expressed concerns, in the places they have expressed those concerns. 

We are just now seeing such actions. But up until now it has been no communication, or a lot of "hey we hear you and we care" accompanied and followed by no visible action. I look forward to getting this archiving issue remedied so we can move on. I am painfully aware of the huge amount of my own time I have had to invest just to get anyone to even talk about this, and so these first steps to fixing what has been broken are very welcome, but not at all exciting. 

Again, thank you for the update... and have a great day!  😛 😂 ( no but seriously, the thank you is sincere 🙂)

[ActivistInvestor]

With coding-related posts, it's not that difficult to define relevant.

If the code continues to work on current product releases, regardless of when it was originally posted, then it's no less-relevant today than it was the day it was posted.

By my guestimate, at least 95% of the code that was originally written to target AutoCAD 2010 and posted here, continues to work today on AutoCAD 2025. With code, changes are rare (mostly because changes can break existing code), so API's are cast in stone for the most-part, making them immune to obsolescence. 

[Curtis_Waguespack]

@ActivistInvestor or others 

I agree with what you’ve said, and have a question: now that the content has been removed, can you suggest some criteria that captures this content to bring it back without bringing back everything and without bringing back a lot of irrelevant content?

I ask because I’m going to have a call on Monday about this and would be happy to offer other ideas. I have my own thoughts but I’m only involved in the Inventor programing world, and I might be unaware of things that matter outside of that world etc. I’m under NDA so can’t be too specific, but for the sake of the question let’s “pretend “ that the content is just Hidden and not completely deleted… if that helps frame suggestions.

I know on the inventor forums there are sometimes code posts that don’t offer working solutions, etc.

example: person posts some code they copied from somewhere and hacked at a bit, and ask an unclear question about it and it never got replied too, etc.

So things like that could be removed, but I think they would need to be drought back first, reviewed and then Marked for archive.

In the inventor world, I think they could bring back all post on the 2 inventor forums that contain code, and then qualified members could be given the ability to mark irrelevant posts as ready to archive, or repurpose them into knowledge base articles, etc. then mark them for archive. But maybe going back to 2000 isn’t needed and it could be just back to 2010 or some other date for other forums?

I'm curious about other peoples thoughts about this for other forums.

[Curtis_Waguespack]

.

[MKE_Howard]

Thanks @Tiana_Y and all the autodesk team. 

[kerry_w_brown]

Wednesday beer-oclock  . . .
It's great to finish the day with a giggle.
This from aChatGPT link did the job !

 

Regards,

[kerry_w_brown]

@Curtis_Waguespack 

Sorry , I missed you post  regarding thoughts for your meeting 
I hope it went well.

ps:  Someone mentioned all unanswered topics and any containing VB.NET ; but I'd be lambasted if I suggested that.

Regards,