[HN Gopher] Autodesk deletes old forum posts suddenly
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Autodesk deletes old forum posts suddenly
        
       Author : nsoonhui
       Score  : 163 points
       Date   : 2025-01-02 05:43 UTC (17 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (forums.autodesk.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (forums.autodesk.com)
        
       | not_your_vase wrote:
       | Unfortunately the "internet doesn't forget" statement has been
       | false since many years. Most companies couldn't care less about
       | keeping the wealth information they've accumulated accessible.
       | 
       | I remember a few years ago TI got bored with updating their
       | cpuwiki, and deleted the whole this - which stings to this day.
       | The internet is still full of links to it to solve crucial
       | issues, only to be greeted with a disappointing error message.
        
         | brutal_chaos_ wrote:
         | Tbf, if you're lucky, there is web.archive.org and others like
         | it, but yes, situations like those are common and
         | disappointing.
        
           | Roark66 wrote:
           | It has became very obvious how reliant we are on Archive.org
           | last time they had an extended outage (remember?, they got
           | hacked,then they couldn't bring the system back up for weeks
           | and weeks). Huge amounts of reference material suddenly
           | dissappeared.
           | 
           | Personally I think it is a huge error we don't force
           | archive.org to allow others to mirror their data easily.
        
             | trilbyglens wrote:
             | Probably the real error is in not having a publically
             | funded mirror.
        
               | 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
               | Certainly seems like something that the Library of
               | Congress should be handling.
        
             | __jonas wrote:
             | > Personally I think it is a huge error we don't force
             | archive.org to allow others to mirror their data easily.
             | 
             | What do you mean by this? I thought they definitely were
             | open to mirrors, why would 'we' need to 'force' them to
             | anything?
             | 
             | IIRC the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt had a mirror of
             | the web archive up, though they may have failed to maintain
             | it
        
           | johnfernow wrote:
           | Right, archive.org is very useful if you have a URL, but if
           | you're searching for a question that was answered in a forum,
           | and that forum post no longer exists and no longer shows up
           | in search results, then it's effectively undiscoverable as
           | far as I'm aware.
           | 
           | It amazes me how companies will have free volunteers help
           | people to use their (often expensive) paid subscription
           | products, and then delete all that info those volunteers
           | wrote up. Don't they want people to use their products?!
           | They're less likely to renew their subscription if they
           | struggle or are unable to use the product for their
           | particular use case.
           | 
           | Unaffiliated forums not ran by the company are better in that
           | the company can't decide to just delete all old posts one day
           | (and while the owner could, certain types of unaffiliated
           | forums are usually a bit easier to clone and republish.) The
           | downside is you don't get assistance from people who work for
           | that company, but often you rarely get that in official
           | forums. The usual reason to use official forums is just that
           | they have significantly more users asking and answering
           | questions than unofficial ones.
        
             | krackers wrote:
             | >that forum post no longer exists and no longer shows up in
             | search results
             | 
             | I dream of someone taking the internet archive data,
             | capping it at 2010 or so, then making a search engine out
             | of it. I mean if AI companies are looking to gobble all the
             | data they can get, then surely they'd jump at the chance to
             | train on (higher quality) data from the past that simply no
             | longer exists on the web. So it'd seem like a win-win
             | situation if IA gave them a copy of the data on the
             | condition that they maintain a permanent backup and provide
             | some sort of searchable index on the data (maybe even via
             | LLM), and in turn the AI companies got access to high
             | quality data on obscure topics that simply no longer
             | exists.
        
               | jraph wrote:
               | Yup, let's not tie such an important endeavor to AI and
               | AI startups though, we need something robust and lasting
               | :-)
        
               | sangnoir wrote:
               | > I dream of someone taking the internet archive data,
               | capping it at 2010 or so, then making a search engine out
               | of it
               | 
               | It sounds like you're describing CommonCrawl.org, and
               | yes, it's already popular with AI companies.
        
         | bee_rider wrote:
         | I think "the internet doesn't forget" was not originally
         | intended that way. It is a reminder that it is hard to reliably
         | delete something from the internet. Unrelated to this auto desk
         | issue.
         | 
         | The internet does forget in the sense that stuff goes missing.
         | Just, only stuff that you don't want to go missing!
        
           | Sanzig wrote:
           | It's essentially a law of the internet. Well-researched
           | website on a niche topic written in the 00s? Lost forever.
           | Your edgelord blog from when you were a teenager? Backed up
           | in triplicate.
        
             | Jalad wrote:
             | Now that I think about it, this just looks like a
             | specialization of Murphy's Law
        
               | jraph wrote:
               | Absolutely. You are screwed either way. It will fall on
               | the wrong side.
        
             | anal_reactor wrote:
             | WebArchive still has a copy of a website that I made that
             | is just text "John Smith is stupid", with John Smith being
             | a friend of mine from teenage years.
        
         | matt3210 wrote:
         | It's in the AI model now no worries
        
         | 256_ wrote:
         | I feel like there should a law about this, but I'm not sure how
         | it would work. Maybe companies should have to at least give a
         | warning before they do it, so Archive Team (or the likes of
         | them) can go into panic mode and archive everything before it
         | gets deleted.
        
           | samtho wrote:
           | I don't think the reaction to everything we dislike should be
           | "let's make it illegal" because you're going to end up with
           | unintended harms. If companies are forced to retain public
           | information against their will, many will simply opt not to
           | have a public forum.
           | 
           | If anything, governments should be proactively funding
           | organizations that archive content and governments can
           | archive content of significant cultural or historical value
           | like the library of congress does for physical media.
        
             | HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
             | I do think there should be some kind of law, but it would
             | also have to comply with gdpr Right to be Forgotten.
        
           | bee_rider wrote:
           | I don't think there should be a law requiring companies to
           | keep a forum up. But perhaps it would be nice if we could
           | have a customer protection based requirement to have some
           | sort of customer support, along with acknowledgement that a
           | customer support forum that could go away at any moment
           | doesn't satisfy that requirement (so either include better
           | customer service or take steps to preserve the community).
           | 
           | I mean we wouldn't want companies to fall afoul of some law
           | because they had to take their forums down due to some
           | privacy ruining bug in the software. Or because the old forum
           | server sitting in the basement died. Or because the third
           | party software they used for the server went out of business.
        
             | vineyardmike wrote:
             | > I mean we wouldn't want companies to fall afoul of some
             | law because they had to take their forums down due to some
             | privacy ruining bug in the software. Or because the old
             | forum server sitting in the basement died. Or because the
             | third party software they used for the server went out of
             | business.
             | 
             | With the exception of maybe a transient bug, isn't this
             | exactly the point?
             | 
             | "We wouldn't want a company to run afoul of [data
             | preservation law] because they [neglected maintenance]"
             | seems like the directly incorrect intent. We _would_ want
             | to compel the business to migrate or modernize any hosting
             | to keep it active and viable. If their vendor goes out of
             | business, they should've paid more or migrated the data.
             | 
             | If we're discussing a local club then sure, they're a
             | victim to hardware failure or business changes, but this
             | thread is full of billion-dollar-businesses. They can spend
             | a few thousand dollars on a forum every few years. When I
             | worked at $FAANG, my service had millions of users and cost
             | like $10K/mo in hosting. Surely the Autodesk forum in read-
             | only mode would cost a much less, and almost nothing if
             | migrated to static HTML.
        
               | knome wrote:
               | It's a bad point. Forcing companies to maintain internet
               | forums just because third parties may want the data in
               | them isn't a reasonable thing to legislate.
        
           | hombre_fatal wrote:
           | That's insane overreach.
           | 
           | The web archive already works from the mode that anything can
           | disappear at any time. Anyone who would rush to archive it if
           | it were going offline could have archived it any time over
           | the last N years.
           | 
           | Websites getting shut down no matter the reason is just a
           | part of life that we need to accept. Laws can't address the
           | underlying churn of time. Forums should be easy come easy go,
           | not open you up to litigation if you shut down your own site
           | too quickly. Cmon.
        
         | jraph wrote:
         | > Unfortunately the "internet doesn't forget" statement has
         | been false since many years
         | 
         | As a sibling comment says, I think such sentences have meant
         | "you can't rely on the internet to forget". Of course the
         | reverse is also true: "you can't rely on the internet to
         | remember".
         | 
         | In short: don't write things you could regret, but make
         | backups.
        
           | frereubu wrote:
           | Reminds me tangentially of the saying attributed to Mohammed
           | - "Trust in God. But tie your camel first."
        
       | nsoonhui wrote:
       | Fun fact: the official announcement of this policy
       | (https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/community-announcements/commu...)
       | is not even reachable via a Google search.
        
         | lelandfe wrote:
         | Possibly just hadn't been indexed yet, looks fine:
         | 
         | https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fforums....
        
         | darth_avocado wrote:
         | > 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.
         | 
         | Ohh god. Always surprises me how people building stuff for the
         | internet completely dont understand the internet.
        
       | geekodour wrote:
       | algolia has done the same for their discourse forum, moved
       | everything to discord and removed all old posts.
       | 
       | Upon asking this was a response from the team: "The Discourse
       | content is no longer available. Much of it was 5+ years old and
       | no longer reflected current SDKs and APIs. We're glad to help you
       | here."
       | 
       | https://ibb.co/3htkxjv
       | https://discord.com/channels/1171089640443367494/12783186879...
       | 
       | people were unhappy obviously. I really don't understand this
       | decision by them.
        
         | benatkin wrote:
         | That's pretty messed up. Maybe they don't deserve the honor of
         | being HN's search engine anymore.
        
           | spockz wrote:
           | Isn't there a fancy LLM ai out there that is suited to
           | ingesting a local knowledge base and create excerpts with
           | links to the original source?
        
             | trilbyglens wrote:
             | Yuck!
        
         | reddalo wrote:
         | Also, why would anyone want to use Discord as a forum? It's
         | horrible, not easily searchable, and you need a proprietary
         | app. Nothing good about it.
        
           | Tomte wrote:
           | You can use your web browser, as well.
        
             | prmoustache wrote:
             | It is still shitty as well. UI/UX are terrible.
        
               | benatkin wrote:
               | It's about the same as the desktop app. It doesn't feel
               | like a web app. The desktop app is better because it
               | doesn't feel out of place.
               | 
               | It's not a bad UI/UX IMO, but it can take some getting
               | used to. For the notifications I have to check several
               | options such as "silence @everyone and @here". Sometimes
               | I find the updates annoying. But it's among the best chat
               | UIs I've tried.
        
               | trilbyglens wrote:
               | Chat is a poor replacement for forums.
        
           | CSMastermind wrote:
           | I'm shocked so many companies use Discord for official
           | purposes.
        
             | arkh wrote:
             | > I'm shocked so many companies use Discord for official
             | purposes.
             | 
             | Going back in time you can replace it with: Discourse,
             | forums, website, IRC.
             | 
             | New generations of devs / manager decide to use "the
             | current tool" to connect with their users. Too bad they
             | also think it a good idea to nuke the older channels.
        
               | sirtaj wrote:
               | This time, the "current tool" doesn't allow searching via
               | the web. Most discord forums I'm on are basically black
               | holes in which questions keep getting repeated.
        
               | reddalo wrote:
               | Exactly, it doesn't even help the owners themselves,
               | because people will keep asking the same things over and
               | over again. It's not like a forum where you can easily
               | search by topic.
        
               | pavel_lishin wrote:
               | The owners do not care as much, because they're not the
               | ones who answer the questions - a cadre of "volunteers"
               | do.
        
             | yieldcrv wrote:
             | I've launched projects that became bigger and discord is
             | just kind of expected when building from the ground up and
             | great for corralling a community
             | 
             | I mentally categorize larger established organizations as
             | something different
             | 
             | but logically I can't really see the difference, so I
             | understand why
             | 
             | I also understand the negatives of that particular platform
             | for getting information efficiently
             | 
             | but I understand why they do it
        
           | oblio wrote:
           | You can just use the website.
           | 
           | Edit: It's <<Discourse>>, not <<Discord>>.
           | 
           | Edit 2: Oh, they moved from Discourse to Discord :-)) That is
           | just messed up.
        
         | Kiro wrote:
         | I definitely understand it. I have some really old blog posts
         | with tutorials for a deprecated version of my software and I
         | get a lot of people complaining about things not working based
         | on those. I've had to add disclaimers to the most popular ones.
        
       | vachina wrote:
       | Removing those content will make user experience worse and make
       | AutoDesk harder to use (or learn on your own). Just let it
       | (autodesk) die.
        
         | baq wrote:
         | Show me a tool that's more entrenched and for good reasons than
         | autodesk's CAD... I'll accept Photoshop, but can not think of
         | anything else
        
         | seb1204 wrote:
         | I am in two minds. All discussion about old old AutoCAD
         | versions is more clutter than value. But discussions about
         | profiles or lisp routines are not.
        
       | acyou wrote:
       | Archiving is probably a more accurate description, the content is
       | likely still there somewhere but can no longer be adversarially
       | web crawled.
        
         | nsoonhui wrote:
         | No, _deletion_ is the accurate description. Some links that are
         | still available on Google search ( eg: try this query
         | "https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+unit+test++civil+3d"
         | and look for the posts that are> 10 year old) are no longer
         | accessible; when you click on them you will be directed to the
         | main forum page.
        
       | CamperBob2 wrote:
       | The user's own .sig says it all: "Everything will work just as
       | you expect it to, unless your expectations are incorrect."
       | 
       | It's Autodesk, a company of skunks. You knew who they were when
       | you signed up with them and gave them money. They did just what
       | anyone who was paying attention would have expected of them.
        
       | chris_wot wrote:
       | Oh god, Autodesk. I tried to see if I could pay for education
       | support because Fusion 360 account setup is unbelievably buggy,
       | but no cigar.
       | 
       | They have the worst installer and registration process in all of
       | history. I really wish we could find an alternative - even
       | willing to pay!
        
         | Foobar8568 wrote:
         | My kid wanted to learn 3d modeling, she is in middle school,
         | and under than 12, according to their licensing, no luck as the
         | kid needs to be over 14.
         | 
         | Support was pointless ("education license is not for commercial
         | use" ). Off we went on blender.
        
           | phoronixrly wrote:
           | Good choice!
        
           | anal_reactor wrote:
           | Back in the day I heard an argument "Photshop and 3DS MAX are
           | so easy to pirate because the companies want the kids to
           | learn these tools, so that later as adult professionals
           | they'll pay license for using them", but if that's no longer
           | true, then good riddance
        
         | Onawa wrote:
         | OnShape has replaced Fusion360 for most of my needs, and it's
         | free for personal use.
        
           | baq wrote:
           | Just the other day I created a fusion 360 account which also
           | seems free for personal use? The CAD space is quite confusing
        
             | arcanemachiner wrote:
             | Free for now, under ever more restrictive conditions.
        
         | krelas wrote:
         | I've been going through the same thing. Take a look at Onshape,
         | it's also free for education. I haven't had a chance to check
         | it out myself yet but I hear good things.
        
       | epa wrote:
       | Should be already archived by archive.org?
        
         | johnfernow wrote:
         | Sure, but you can't search for the forum pages on archive.org
         | as far as I'm aware (or at least as easily as searching on
         | Autodesk's website or Google/Bing/etc.) For the time being, old
         | forum posts will likely still show up in search engine search
         | results, and you can take those URLs and look them up on
         | archive.org.
         | 
         | Eventually though they'll likely no longer show up whenever the
         | search engine's crawlers revisit and it's a redirect, in which
         | case the pages are undiscoverable.
        
       | neilv wrote:
       | Is this motivated by the value of the text (for internal use, or
       | selling it), or about to launch some new "AI-powered" support
       | thing, or by the headache of dealing with data scrapers pounding
       | their servers, or something else?
        
       | simonw wrote:
       | Urgh, cultural vandalism.
       | 
       | The challenge here is that there are people out there who just do
       | not understand the inherent value of this kind of old content. If
       | any company exists for long enough eventually some of those
       | people will cycle into positions of decision-making authority
       | where they get to "save costs" or "clean things up" by delete-
       | hammering some invaluable artifact like this one.
       | 
       | The correct way to handle this is to add a BIG banner on top of
       | older content like this warning "This post is from 12 years ago,
       | and may no longer reflect the most recent version of our
       | software".
       | 
       | Flattening a bunch of dynamic pages to static HTML can also be
       | useful, if the concern is maintaining old forum software.
        
         | SuperNinKenDo wrote:
         | It's not that they don't understand, it's that they don't care,
         | more often than not. Sadly there has been a societal shift in
         | my view that will be hard to reverse, just think of Boeing as
         | an extreme example. We've created incentive structures that not
         | only reward short-sighted decision making, but also created
         | social norms that punish people who try to push for long-term
         | goals or things that are not in one's immediate self-interest.
         | Corporate sees you as a headache for not thinking about nothing
         | but line going up, and your peers will deride you as a fool for
         | not "getting it" and giving up like they have.
        
         | anal_reactor wrote:
         | Why offer knowledge for free if you can offer premium support
         | instead
        
         | bragr wrote:
         | When Oracle bought Sun/Solaris, they took down the public
         | Solaris forums which made my job working with illumos forks
         | very difficult without all the years relevant Solaris 10
         | questions and answers. In that case, it was a naked attempt to
         | force people to license the then new Solaris 11.
        
         | kjs3 wrote:
         | This isn't about cost reduction. It's about eliminating any
         | assistance for people who want to continue to use old versions
         | of the software. Adobe is in the cloud/subscription business
         | now, and it wants to make life for people holding on to their
         | local, licensed copies as difficult as possible.
        
           | jxramos wrote:
           | this seems true and explains my inability to locate the
           | plugin tooling for the latest version of Acrobat to develop
           | some local extensions. My next move was to contact Adobe and
           | ask directly where the corresponding SDK is to be downloaded
           | for the latest local version of Acrobat. Sometimes companies
           | give you some internal link that you can't find publicly or
           | can't navigate to from the present version of their website.
        
         | toomuchtodo wrote:
         | Always Be Archiving. Never trust the platform.
         | 
         | https://wiki.archiveteam.org/
        
         | criddell wrote:
         | How are these old posts invaluable? Do you think a paywall
         | would have generated enough revenue to pay for serving them? If
         | nobody is willing to pay for access, doesn't that mean they are
         | in fact not valuable at all?
        
           | bdndndndbve wrote:
           | Such an insane paperclip optimizing way of thinking. The
           | marginal cost to serve static content is very low as well -
           | if they really didn't want to pay anything they could give it
           | to a third party.
        
           | ToucanLoucan wrote:
           | Autodesk made almost 5 billion dollars in 2023. You can host
           | a vBulletin forum with incredibly high traffic for a couple
           | thousand a year. Stop making excuses for shitty companies.
        
             | kstrauser wrote:
             | And that forum also provides an enormous amount of value to
             | a company, saving them many multiples of that cost in
             | reduced support expenses.
             | 
             | Deleting this is madness.
        
           | simonw wrote:
           | A paywall would make them useless, because you wouldn't be
           | able to find them using Google.
        
         | bsder wrote:
         | > Urgh, cultural vandalism.
         | 
         | This was probably intentional. Those posts are no longer
         | available to feed an AI. Now only Autodesk has access to those
         | posts.
         | 
         | People need to understand that the free ride is over. If you
         | aren't hosting or archiving, it's going to disappear.
        
         | rightbyte wrote:
         | Ye I hate this. I work with a processor that TI manufactures
         | and a huge part of the "eco system" was referring to a now
         | defunct forum and wiki. It is a mess. At some point they just
         | deleted it and replaced it with nothing. Links to download of
         | tools and libs are broken. And support don't have them. I was
         | just lucky I found them on arhive.org ...
        
         | ghaff wrote:
         | To give another perspective, from a company perspective,
         | companies are mostly not really in the business of providing an
         | archive. And if you provide a bunch of outdated information--
         | banners flagging it as such or otherwise--you're mostly not
         | doing most people any favors when they encounter that info when
         | doing a search. Most companies pretty aggressively remove info
         | more than a year old or whatever.
        
         | WalterBright wrote:
         | When I build a Javascript compiler, it used a lot of ActiveX
         | interfaces. In the code that used a particular interface, I'd
         | include a link to the Microsoft documentation on it.
         | 
         | One day, all those links went to dead ends.
        
         | iJohnDoe wrote:
         | According to some sources, this is what happened to Google
         | Search.
        
       | Maakuth wrote:
       | ArchiveTeam (https://wiki.archiveteam.org/) fairly routinely
       | makes archival blitzes on dying forums. If there's any
       | forewarning of such on a forum you frequent, let them know.
        
         | ykonstant wrote:
         | If only they were around when my old hangout, www.wota.com, was
         | alive :(
        
       | theoa wrote:
       | John Walker the founder would grieve as well:
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer)
       | 
       | He was a digital hoarder sharer. See:
       | 
       | https://fourmilab.ch/
        
         | cowboylowrez wrote:
         | just nabbed his midi to csv gadgets! seems like an awesome guy!
        
       | deckar01 wrote:
       | It needed curation pretty bad. There is no shortage of people who
       | ask and answer questions. The relevant knowledge will resurface
       | as needed. I just hope they manage outdated information better in
       | the future.
        
       | rossng wrote:
       | Does Autodesk have any remaining users that actually _enjoy_
       | being their customer? Their CAD software is unstable and painful
       | (just try installing it...); architects resent their stewardship
       | of Revit[1] and so on.
       | 
       | This seems like an existential risk to the company if something
       | better comes along. Sure, they have massive lock-in, but these
       | things don't last forever. Remember when we all thought that
       | Microsoft Office file formats guaranteed an eternal monopoly?
       | 
       | [1] https://the-nordic-letter.com/
        
         | sschueller wrote:
         | Fusion 360 is getting worse and costs more every year. Now they
         | just emailed that the early renewal discount will also no
         | longer be available.
         | 
         | Sadly FreeCAD is just not there where it needs to be to be a
         | good alternative.
        
           | deckar01 wrote:
           | Fusion turned a corner recently imo. They added the ability
           | to reference driven dimensions in formulas, which makes fully
           | parametric designs trivial. I seem to never get hung
           | calculations or crashes anymore.
        
             | montecarl wrote:
             | I use fusion 360 several times a week, but I'm not quite
             | able to follow what you said. Can you provide an example or
             | a link to where they announced this feature?
        
         | throw_m239339 wrote:
         | Businesses have pipelines entirely relying on Autodesk tools &
         | formats.
         | 
         | > but these things don't last forever. Remember when we all
         | thought that Microsoft Office file formats guaranteed an
         | eternal monopoly?
         | 
         | It will last long enough for Autodesk. The real issue being why
         | Autodesk was allowed to basically buy most of its main
         | competitors in the 3D/CAD authoring tool space without any push
         | back from government agencies.
        
           | jlarocco wrote:
           | > The real issue being why Autodesk was allowed to basically
           | buy most of its main competitors in the 3D/CAD authoring tool
           | space without any push back from government agencies.
           | 
           | That's not even remotely true. There's Dassault/Catia,
           | Siemens/NX, PTC/Creo, and probably a dozen (or more) niche
           | competitors.
           | 
           | The real problem is massive vendor lock-in. Each CAD company
           | goes out of their way to have crappy interop with the others.
        
         | quickthrowman wrote:
         | Software for the construction industry is uniformly terrible,
         | Autodesk and Trimble are the big players and I'd be grateful if
         | someone disrupted them.
         | 
         | There is a small amount of good construction software, Procore
         | (project and document management) and Bluebeam (amazing pdf
         | editor) are wonderful tools but the estimating software I use
         | by Trimble is _awful_. Inconsistent UI, they use their own
         | custom GUI elements instead of the built in Windows GUI
         | elements, unclear interfaces, every UI /UX crime is present in
         | it.
         | 
         | Autodesk isn't going anywhere tho, basically every
         | architect/engineer uses it (in commercial construction).
        
           | johnyoder wrote:
           | If you are a GC looking for an alternative project management
           | software that is easy to use, modern, and fairly priced,
           | consider https://constructable.ai (full transparency, I'm one
           | of the co-founders).
           | 
           | Everything being said about existing software in this post
           | very much resonates with what we learned talking to hundreds
           | of GCs. We want to change this.
        
         | harrall wrote:
         | If you think Autodesk is bad, try their competition.
         | 
         | Paid competiting software from companies like Dassault are even
         | more locked down and free software alternatives don't even come
         | close in feature parity.
         | 
         | Autodesk can do this because it's been 40 years, a lot of
         | people have tried, and somehow they all manage to make
         | something worse.
        
       | fuzzfactor wrote:
       | Has anybody identified the decision-maker responsible?
       | 
       | Hopefully it's only a single individual who is now confirmed to
       | be completely unsuitable for any future decision-making
       | whatsoever.
       | 
       | Without doing as much of a root-cause analysis as possible,
       | people will not even be aware where the deficiency arose and
       | there may be no protection going forward from such below-average
       | performance.
       | 
       | Decision-making is not for just anybody, I think it's obvious if
       | you don't nip faultiness in the bud it could get even worse and
       | spread to other companies.
       | 
       | Even some companies which were high-integrity to begin with, as
       | we have seen.
        
       | crtified wrote:
       | The internet, or dare I say it, Information Technology itself,
       | has not yet come to proper terms with Time Context as an implicit
       | aspect of data. Much information is not static, but rather is a
       | growing or changing development from year-to-year.
       | 
       | Using today's generic tools to search for digital information
       | relevant to a specific version or time period of anything is very
       | ad-hoc, hit-and-miss. And we're only a mere few decades in. I
       | think the time context of data is going to become increasingly
       | important and valuable.
        
       | double0jimb0 wrote:
       | Autodesk deserves to be poster child for enshitification.
       | 
       | A few weeks ago I found a video that allowed me to work around a
       | bug in Inventor 2025 that has existed for 20 years... the video
       | was a grainy screen capture from a Windows 97 machine!
       | 
       | And each year I pay more for a product that gets worse.
        
       | sota_pop wrote:
       | As someone who used Revit for 5 years before moving to develop
       | and maintain custom Revit API apps full-time, I have many horror
       | stories I could share (feel free to AMA). I can say that the
       | latest version of Revit (R2025) is largely a single-threaded
       | application, and has only just upgraded their back-end from .Net
       | Framework 4.8.1 to .Net8.0. The company continuously and openly
       | takes breathtakingly blatant advantage of their user base and is
       | at worst adversarial to their users. The software captures and
       | exchanges a surprising amount of data during usage (to the point
       | that Revit itself is hard to distinguish between malware by
       | network cybersec software). Autodesk is a walking-talking
       | timebomb of an antitrust suit waiting to happen. With that said,
       | Revit does a lot of things well and there are no realistic
       | alternatives. Personally, I have always found community responses
       | on forums very helpful while autodesk support has ranged from
       | helpful, to useless, to simultaneously counter-productive and
       | insulting. Jeremy Tammik (officially affiliated with Autodesk
       | these days) and his "The Building Coder Blog" is a very nice
       | reference for Revit API and he is somehow EVERYWHERE on the
       | forums.
       | 
       | edit: the open letter posted here by another user does a very
       | good job detailing many broad issues (with Revit in particular);
       | every point it makes is accurate in my experience.
        
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