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Clean-up the Revit Ideas Forum

Clean-up the Revit Ideas Forum

Before we can vote for good ideas, we have to be able to see them. We are now over 2500 ideas submitted. I can't realistically scroll through 130+ pages of ideas.  

  • There are some really good ideas buried in this forum, most will never see past a dozen votes as they are cast to page 6 or 7 due to the influx of repetitive submissions. Some are complaints, not ideas. (The irony of that statement is not lost on me)
  • In the last 2 days, I have seen 6 ideas submitted that are exact replicas of others due to people not reading the forum guidelines. Item no 1: Check to see if your idea is similar to another's before posting!
  • Out of 2500+ ideas, less than a dozen have been 'archived'. The rest are apparently "gathering support". Now there is a loose term if I ever saw one. 

If this is going to be a serious platform for development and feedback from customers, it needs to be maintained better. With the automation tech today, this shouldn't have to be a burden for Autodesk. 

 

  • Let's start with tightening the term "gathering support" to ideas with at least 20 votes or more. Create a new category called "New" or "Recent"
  • How about when ideas get new votes, it moves to the top, just like the Revit forum, posts that are years old float back to the top if someone comments. If it really is a good idea, it will stay at the top gathering votes and visible to all. If not, it will drop off. 
  • How about new ideas can't be posted until you click a message saying you did a search before posting. Sure you can just click past it, but its a good reminder. 
  • The auto "searching for similar posts" when writing the title should be just ideas, not forum posts from years ago. It just creates clutter. 
  • Give us sorting options. If I want to see ideas 'under review' I also want to sort just those ideas by highest kudos for example. 

Thanks all and hopefully we can get more out of this forum. 

 

99 Comments
adrian.calabria
Advocate

Thanks Sasha, there was no malice in my comment. The general feeling I have had is a lot don't even get read by the Autodesk Team as there is no response.

 

Perhaps an internal template of response options so we at least know it has been read & in the review system

  • read & reviewing
  • read & reviewing. Please provide more specific info
  • read & duplicated
  • read & not implementing yet
  • read & not implementing ever
  • read & too many ideas, please narrow them down. This topic will be archived.
  • etc

I/we understand it has probably turned out bigger than you expected. There seem to be a lot of 'complaints' rather than ideas as well clogging up the forum.

 

It is appreciated that the team is manually going through the topics to start to clean them up.

 

sasha.crotty
Community Manager

@adrian.calabria, no malice assumed. Just trying (and failing) to be funny. 

 

Thanks for the feedback.  The Revit PMs read a lot more ideas than we comment on. I'm interested to see what's trending or I often check in to see if a specific idea is posted as it comes up in a conversation. Unfortunately, the reality is that it's just not possible for us to comment on every issue we've seen. However, the point is well taken.

 

A lot of the suggested options actually align very closely with our statuses (see below).

  • read & reviewing - this is the Under Review status, we currently have a 50 vote cut off for reviewing issues, this is largely because it takes development team time to review an idea
  • read & reviewing. Please provide more specific info - same as above and you'll see comments from us, for the most part however the items are fairly self-explanatory for the purposes of making a go/no go decision and the detailed information gathering happens when teams take on the implementation
  • read & duplicated - typically we just merge these with the duplicate
  • read & not implementing yet - this is the Future Consideration status
  • read & not implementing ever - this is the Archive status 
  • read & too many ideas, please narrow them down. This topic will be archived. - these are usually flagged for the moderator. I have a really hard time with these because I often don't catch them until they've received a decent number of votes and I don't want to throw the votes away. However ideas with multiple suggestions are almost impossible to accept because it is not clear what suggestion people were voting for. Feel free to flag these for the moderator with "multiple ideas" if you see them.

@damo3@dgorsman, Yes reporting to the moderator can certainly help deal with duplicates, etc. The one thing to be aware of is that the moderator does not have a Revit background. So make sure to report only things that you're 100% sure are the same.

dgorsman
Consultant

If you're *not* 100% sure an idea is a duplicate or requires moderator attention, there's a couple of steps I would recommend.  The first would be to create a new post in the relevant discussion board and link to the Idea(s) in question for reference.  This way it can get some discussion and hopefully consensus without increasing the "noise" under that Idea.  You can also tap one of the Expert Elite, preferably a Revit-centric one, for advice.  We don't have moderator abilities to edit, merge, or delete but we can provide some productive courses of action.

d-denton
Contributor

@sasha.crotty Thanks for all your comments Sasha.

jkucia
Advocate

I hope this gets implemented immediately, I can't wait for the sheer brilliance of my "Revit Needs Embedded Banana Emoticons" idea to gain the attention and acceptance it desperately deserves.

 

More seriously: the Chan-style "float back to the top" method of giving good ideas more attention is, while perhaps a tad flawed, superior to what is available in the Autodesk forums.

 

FYI, I have sometimes tried to hunt down multiple ideas similar to mine, then use the "report" button to notify the moderator with all of the links.  I'm never certain if anything becomes of that report.  It occurs to me, however, that fairly often those "other" ideas are similar, but not exactly, the same as mine.  Perhaps a grouping or cross-tagging feature might work in tandem, or as a replacement, for "Related Ideas"?

WM_Ron_Allen
Collaborator

@sasha.crotty Autodesk is boasting using Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning(ML), things like IBM Watson...

 

Why not have :

  • A pseudo click-through interface to ID the area the idea is centered on (Returns structure data point)
  • Structured data requirement based on menu operations (e.g. "Manage.additional settings.line styles") 
  • AI to gather these and similar content e.g. those mentioning "linestyles" or "line Styles" or "Line"

This data then used to put them into bucketed (Bayesian inference) up in a threaded list based on the hierarchy. Similar ideas would be side by side then moderators could group them together for similar content... or identify the similarities and differences to break them out in a reformatting idea.

 

This may seem a petty application of ML- however it begins to organize and codify ideas- that same codification and learned hierarchy can be used for help files, data access, API and a myriad of other uses. : )

 

pieter5
Advisor

I've been reporting duplicate ideas the last couple of weeks but haven't seen any sign of life from the moderator. Are these messages getting to someone?

 

Just wanted to be sure I'm not wasting my time here.

 

 

 

 

sasha.crotty
Community Manager

@pieter5, you're saying the duplicates haven't been removed? Let me check in and find out what's going on.

 

damo3
Advisor

@pieter5

Yes, not sure if you are referring to notification to you or no action on the reports, but I never get any notifications, but I do see action taken, so if you are expecting an email saying something along the lines of "thanks we have moved this idea here" that's not how it appears to work. 

craigh_bim
Advocate

Idea Options:

@sasha.crotty maybe we can address the active users creating duplicate posts by having a pull down in the Ideas Options that flags it as duplicate. This way we can help this process, and on your end you can sort by that parameter. It's crowd sourcing your work. And, if someone else flags it, a user can see the flag as "Flagged for Duplicate". This would reduce redundant flagging. It could also let the OP know they should look for the original and upvote that post.

WM_Ron_Allen
Collaborator
AI or Machine Learning to structure like ideas together...
"The content posted relates to XYZ and has been nested underneath the conversation"
craigh_bim
Advocate

@sasha.crotty

Could we also have voting on idea comments? If someone posts a new idea in a comment, that idea may not be noticed by Autodesk, but is valuable. It would be nice to upvote some ideas.

 

mp_thompson
Advocate

Great suggestions @damo3 and thanks for the feedback @sasha.crotty

 

I've noticed similar ideas that have been merged in the past.

 

How many people are tasked with the maintenance of the ideas if it's not something that can be automated?

AplusIAutoDesk
Explorer

I have flagged 10 ideas as a duplicates in the last 10 minutes. Hope this will be picked up by the moderators.

AplusIAutoDesk
Explorer

So far, nothing has changed. Seems like reporting doesn't do much.

damo3
Advisor

Update.

When I first posted this idea a few months ago, I mentioned in my OP that less than a dozen ideas had been 'Archived'. Now there are more than 230 ideas archived. Whilst this is relatively small amount compared to the number of ideas, this is my view still a significant jump in just a few months, so thanks to Autodesk. 

 

Also, whilst some people are having hit and miss response regarding reporting, remember, Autodesk don't respond, so it may be that the administrator didn't agree with you. Remember, @sasha.crotty pointed out that the admin person is not necessarily Revit centric, so you have to be 100% sure. The other thing you can do is post a comment in the idea with a link to the other ideas. 

 

At the moment, roughly 250 ideas are being posted every month! In other words, at current numbers, even if Autodesk implemented 1 idea every day, it would still take nearly 10 years. The Revit product managers are well aware of this fact. So, how do you make the seemingly unmanageable, manageable? By Filtering.

 

So I came to post an idea about tool filtering as a possible solution, but in re-reading comments realised others have already mentioned something very similar, so I will simply echo @d-denton & @WM_Ron_Allen ideas about filtering user ideas by Tool / Ribbon / Panel. 

 

The ability to filter or categorise ideas by tool, I think would see an improvement.
For example, let's say you had an idea about design options. You would go to the forum and select or search from a list of tools in Revit. You would find and see only the ideas relating to 'Design Options'. Furthermore, they could be filtered AND sorted by discipline, vote count, status, date, author, etc. If you can't find what you are looking for, write an idea and categorise it accordingly. This may even help Autodesk see what the discussion is around a particular tool set for consideration into their roadmap.

 

WM_Ron_Allen
Collaborator

@damo3 yes- we could browse and click multiple affected areas if necessary to help organize at least graphic ideas. Tools Like Atomi Active Presenter already captures this as does screencast : )

 

Otherwise AI interpretation of similar ideas could be implemented using IBM.Watson (Yes there is access available- no, I don't know if this is a worth while task or opponent ; )

pieter5
Advisor

The ideas I marked as duplicates are clearly exact copies (sometimes titles are even identical), so I can't see why there would be a debate about them. My guess:

 

- reports are not getting to an admin

- admins are overwhelmed

- admin has no clue about revit and errs on the (very safe) side.

 

any of these issues should be starightforward to fix. 

sasha.crotty
Community Manager

Hi guys, thanks for all your help. I just spoke to our moderator and we're going to try out a new system for managing duplicates that have been flagged. Hopefully it will help clean these up a little faster. Please do keep notifying the moderator when you see duplicates. Thanks!

damo3
Advisor

Thanks for the update @sasha.crotty.

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