16 ms·

Autodesk deletes old forum posts suddenly

250 points by nsoonhui 2y ago

Octopuz 2y ago
We have both an AutoCAD subscription and a perpetual license for the 2010 version. We couldn't install the 2010 version anymore because they shut down their activation server.
not_your_vase 2y ago
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_ 2y ago
  Tbf, if you're lucky, there is web.archive.org and others like it, but yes, situations like those are common and disappointing.
  - Roark66 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      Probably the real error is in not having a publically funded mirror.
      - 3eb7988a1663 2y ago
        Certainly seems like something that the Library of Congress should be handling.
        jacobgkau 2y ago
        The problem with this is that there's all kinds of user-generated web content that certain people wouldn't want tax dollars going towards preserving. I can already look at e.g. the National Film Registry and say I don't care about movies so my tax dollars shouldn't go towards preserving them, regardless of what some bureaucrat thinks is "culturally significant." The film industry has a pretty massive network of artists who are able to go to bat for that stuff, though. But then take pornography, or hate speech (and/or straight-up misinformation), or content that's illegal in the US but not elsewhere (like drug recipes or weapons schematics). It's already tricky for a private entity to handle convincing people of the value of preserving everything physically and legally possible to preserve. Making an argument for doing it as a public function, even in good faith, could easily turn into a mess-- especially when we can barely agree what should be allowed on the internet now.
    - __jonas 2y ago
      > 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
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - Idesmi 2y ago
      It's not like the forbid mirroring. The problem is simply the size of it: around 100 petabytes.
  - johnfernow 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      >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 2y ago
        Yup, let's not tie such an important endeavor to AI and AI startups though, we need something robust and lasting :-)
      - sangnoir 2y ago
        > 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      Now that I think about it, this just looks like a specialization of Murphy's Law
      - jraph 2y ago
        Absolutely. You are screwed either way. It will fall on the wrong side.
    - anal_reactor 2y ago
      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.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- matt3210 2y ago
  It’s in the AI model now no worries
- 256_ 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      I do think there should be some kind of law, but it would also have to comply with gdpr Right to be Forgotten.
    - precommunicator 2y ago
      Great! If they don't have a public forum there is no opportunity to do harm, I see no issue here. The community will still ask questions and answers somewhere e.g. in one of Stack Exchange sites which is less likely to be removed and/or forgotten
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    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.
- jraph 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    Reminds me tangentially of the saying attributed to Mohammed - "Trust in God. But tie your camel first."
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
nsoonhui 2y ago
Fun fact: the official announcement of this policy (https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/community-announcements/community-content-archiving-announcement-and-faq/td-p/13187702 https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/community-announcements/commu...) is not even reachable via a Google search.
- lelandfe 2y ago
  Possibly just hadn't been indexed yet, looks fine: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fforums.autodesk.com%2Ft5%2F+%22Community+Content+Archiving%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fforums....
- darth_avocado 2y ago
  > 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.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    You're wrong. We're wrong. Sanctioning behaviors idiots do as official makes things more approachable. It doesn't matter that not doing things elitist ways wreck productivity because output quantity nor quality no longer matter but how strongly one is aligned with zeitgeist do as if we're living in a Soviet Russian shoestring factory. It sucks.
geekodour 2y ago
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://ibb.co/3htkxjv https://discord.com/channels/1171089640443367494/1278318687987961856 https://discord.com/channels/1171089640443367494/12783186879... people were unhappy obviously. I really don't understand this decision by them.
- benatkin 2y ago
  That's pretty messed up. Maybe they don't deserve the honor of being HN's search engine anymore.
  - spockz 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      Yuck!
- reddalo 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    You can use your web browser, as well.
    - prmoustache 2y ago
      It is still shitty as well. UI/UX are terrible.
vachina 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
Archiving is probably a more accurate description, the content is likely still there somewhere but can no longer be adversarially web crawled.
- nsoonhui 2y ago
  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 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.
  - jacobgkau 2y ago
    I think they were insinuating, with no basis, that Autodesk is for some reason keeping the removed posts in their own offline/intranet backup. They could've also been thrown off by the PR speak the Autodesk employee who announced this used, in which they called it "archiving" but also said "we cannot keep the content" (https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/community-announcements/community-content-archiving-announcement-and-faq/td-p/13187702 https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/community-announcements/commu...).
  - acyou 2y ago
    Just because you can't see something doesn't mean it isn't still there somewhere. If you are looking for something and it isn't where you last found it, you usually wouldn't assume it's "gone". Yeah, maybe for you it's as good as deleted. But I suspect Autodesk retained 100% of this data for subsequent machine learning application. And I think for you to say it's deleted, how are you going to prove there are no copies?
    - nsoonhui 2y ago
      >> And I think for you to say it's deleted, how are you going to prove there are no copies? This is really an astonishing question ( claim?). If going by your definition then no one is capable of proving that any Internet contents have been deleted. "Deletion" becomes a meaningless word.
chris_wot 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Good choice!
  - anal_reactor 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  OnShape has replaced Fusion360 for most of my needs, and it's free for personal use.
  - baq 2y ago
    Just the other day I created a fusion 360 account which also seems free for personal use? The CAD space is quite confusing
    - arcanemachiner 2y ago
      Free for now, under ever more restrictive conditions.
CamperBob2 2y ago
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.
epa 2y ago
Should be already archived by archive.org?
- johnfernow 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  Why offer knowledge for free if you can offer premium support instead
  - hulitu 2y ago
    > Why offer knowledge for free if you can offer premium support instead Because it is mostly not knowledge, but tips to make their software work.
- bragr 2y ago
  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.
Maakuth 2y ago
ArchiveTeam (https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ 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 2y ago
  If only they were around when my old hangout, www.wota.com, was alive :(
- mmooss 2y ago
  How does the public access ArchiveTeam's archives?
  - Maakuth 2y ago
    They send everything to archive.org and the data is eventually included in the Wayback Machine.
theoa 2y ago
John Walker the founder would grieve as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer) He was a digital hoarder sharer. See: https://fourmilab.ch/ https://fourmilab.ch/
- cowboylowrez 2y ago
  just nabbed his midi to csv gadgets! seems like an awesome guy!
deckar01 2y ago
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 2y ago
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/ https://the-nordic-letter.com/
- sschueller 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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?
      - deckar01 2y ago
        https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/blog/october-2023-product-update-whats-new/#:~:text=With%20this%20new%20enhancement%20to,the%20need%20for%20complicated%20equations https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/blog/october-20....
    - daniel_reetz 2y ago
      Fusion is my daily driver and this is a huge thing for me. Missed it. Thanks.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
fuzzfactor 2y ago
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 2y ago
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.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Having been involved in creating content and deciding whether it should be retired or not, it really isn't about the money. Product docs can be locked to versions and archived pretty well; most sensible people understand the docs for 1.0 may not apply to version 3.0. But there are a ton of things on a company website that don't really apply to the here and now and will be increasingly out of date. And, if you just leave everything accessible forever, it pollutes the current information. I get that some people prefer everything is just left online but it gets harder and harder for all the folks who just want info that's fairly current.
  - gmueckl 2y ago
    You can explicitly move old content to an archive and put big banners on it that it doesn't reflect current information. MS does an OK job of making it obvious that you're looking at documentation for an older product, for example.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      As I wrote, product documentation is versioned anyway so that's fairly straightforward. But a ton of other stuff is variably still relevant and can get in the way of finding what's most relevant and accurate for today. Whenever I would go to update something older, it would invariably take me longer than I planned because even things that were not flat-out wrong often didn't reflect current thinking, terminology, usage, etc.
double0jimb0 2y ago
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 2y ago
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.
- sota_pop 2y ago
  As a follow-up, it is always sad to see large volumes of community-driven content deleted especially when the motives are likely for selfish or nefarious purposes. Being somewhat familiar with the latest releases, Autodesk has been pushing their cloud services (Forge, or whatever they’re calling it this month) and AI. They are probably deleting the content after having fine-tuned an LLM on it and patting themselves on the back for a job well done.
- VyseofArcadia 2y ago
  > With that said, Revit does a lot of things well and there are no realistic alternatives. Vectorworks? Archicad? I'm really only familiar with the former, full disclosure I used to work at Vectorworks, and we certainly considered ourselves a competitor to Revit.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
_7acn 2y ago
Fun fact: In 2008, Autodesk acquired the competing and highly regarded Softimage, even though it already owned two 3D applications (3ds Max and Maya), only to shut it down six years later.
yacine_ 2y ago
that's why i'm writing my own cad software, dingcad at dingcad.com it will be free and open source
j45 2y ago
I wonder if this had anything to do with the increased LLM traffic to forums that I thought there had been a post about recently.
byyoung3 2y ago
Data is oil.
chaostheory 2y ago
This is likely due to legal reasons. I remember some child protection law where many forums decided to shut down rather than be legally and financially liable for breaking these laws.
altairprime 2y ago
When does the UK forum responsibility law take effect?
mensetmanusman 2y ago
Many don’t realize that the internet is a series of tubes connected to computers that are in the process of breaking.
- jfil 2y ago
  Real hackers Memento Mori
LeoNatan25 2y ago
What a stupid and ridiculous thing to do in 2024. The budget overhead of storage, serving, traffic, bulletin-board software maintenance and moderation is negligible for a company like Autodesk. This is likely the idea of some idiot middle-management clown that had to show "progress" and "impact" to their own management in order to get a performance bonus.

250 points by nsoonhui 2y ago

We have both an AutoCAD subscription and a perpetual license for the 2010 version. We couldn't install the 2010 version anymore because they shut down their activation server.

not_your_vase 2y ago

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_ 2y ago
Tbf, if you're lucky, there is web.archive.org and others like it, but yes, situations like those are common and disappointing.
- Roark66 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Probably the real error is in not having a publically funded mirror.
    - 3eb7988a1663 2y ago
      Certainly seems like something that the Library of Congress should be handling.
      - jacobgkau 2y ago
        The problem with this is that there's all kinds of user-generated web content that certain people wouldn't want tax dollars going towards preserving. I can already look at e.g. the National Film Registry and say I don't care about movies so my tax dollars shouldn't go towards preserving them, regardless of what some bureaucrat thinks is "culturally significant." The film industry has a pretty massive network of artists who are able to go to bat for that stuff, though. But then take pornography, or hate speech (and/or straight-up misinformation), or content that's illegal in the US but not elsewhere (like drug recipes or weapons schematics). It's already tricky for a private entity to handle convincing people of the value of preserving everything physically and legally possible to preserve. Making an argument for doing it as a public function, even in good faith, could easily turn into a mess-- especially when we can barely agree what should be allowed on the internet now.
  - __jonas 2y ago
    > 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
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - Idesmi 2y ago
    It's not like the forbid mirroring. The problem is simply the size of it: around 100 petabytes.
- johnfernow 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    >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 2y ago
      Yup, let's not tie such an important endeavor to AI and AI startups though, we need something robust and lasting :-)
    - sangnoir 2y ago
      > 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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Now that I think about it, this just looks like a specialization of Murphy's Law
    - jraph 2y ago
      Absolutely. You are screwed either way. It will fall on the wrong side.
  - anal_reactor 2y ago
    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.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
matt3210 2y ago
It’s in the AI model now no worries
256_ 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    I do think there should be some kind of law, but it would also have to comply with gdpr Right to be Forgotten.
  - precommunicator 2y ago
    Great! If they don't have a public forum there is no opportunity to do harm, I see no issue here. The community will still ask questions and answers somewhere e.g. in one of Stack Exchange sites which is less likely to be removed and/or forgotten
- bee_rider 2y ago
  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.
jraph 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  Reminds me tangentially of the saying attributed to Mohammed - "Trust in God. But tie your camel first."
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

nsoonhui 2y ago

Fun fact: the official announcement of this policy (https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/community-announcements/community-content-archiving-announcement-and-faq/td-p/13187702 https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/community-announcements/commu...) is not even reachable via a Google search.

lelandfe 2y ago
Possibly just hadn't been indexed yet, looks fine: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fforums.autodesk.com%2Ft5%2F+%22Community+Content+Archiving%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fforums....
darth_avocado 2y ago
> 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.
- numpad0 2y ago
  You're wrong. We're wrong. Sanctioning behaviors idiots do as official makes things more approachable. It doesn't matter that not doing things elitist ways wreck productivity because output quantity nor quality no longer matter but how strongly one is aligned with zeitgeist do as if we're living in a Soviet Russian shoestring factory. It sucks.

geekodour 2y ago

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://ibb.co/3htkxjv https://discord.com/channels/1171089640443367494/1278318687987961856 https://discord.com/channels/1171089640443367494/12783186879... people were unhappy obviously. I really don't understand this decision by them.

benatkin 2y ago
That's pretty messed up. Maybe they don't deserve the honor of being HN's search engine anymore.
- spockz 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Yuck!
reddalo 2y ago
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 2y ago
  You can use your web browser, as well.
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    It is still shitty as well. UI/UX are terrible.

vachina 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago

Archiving is probably a more accurate description, the content is likely still there somewhere but can no longer be adversarially web crawled.

nsoonhui 2y ago
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 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.
- jacobgkau 2y ago
  I think they were insinuating, with no basis, that Autodesk is for some reason keeping the removed posts in their own offline/intranet backup. They could've also been thrown off by the PR speak the Autodesk employee who announced this used, in which they called it "archiving" but also said "we cannot keep the content" (https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/community-announcements/community-content-archiving-announcement-and-faq/td-p/13187702 https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/community-announcements/commu...).
- acyou 2y ago
  Just because you can't see something doesn't mean it isn't still there somewhere. If you are looking for something and it isn't where you last found it, you usually wouldn't assume it's "gone". Yeah, maybe for you it's as good as deleted. But I suspect Autodesk retained 100% of this data for subsequent machine learning application. And I think for you to say it's deleted, how are you going to prove there are no copies?
  - nsoonhui 2y ago
    >> And I think for you to say it's deleted, how are you going to prove there are no copies? This is really an astonishing question ( claim?). If going by your definition then no one is capable of proving that any Internet contents have been deleted. "Deletion" becomes a meaningless word.

chris_wot 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Good choice!
- anal_reactor 2y ago
  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 2y ago
OnShape has replaced Fusion360 for most of my needs, and it's free for personal use.
- baq 2y ago
  Just the other day I created a fusion 360 account which also seems free for personal use? The CAD space is quite confusing
  - arcanemachiner 2y ago
    Free for now, under ever more restrictive conditions.

CamperBob2 2y ago

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.

epa 2y ago

Should be already archived by archive.org?

johnfernow 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
Why offer knowledge for free if you can offer premium support instead
- hulitu 2y ago
  > Why offer knowledge for free if you can offer premium support instead Because it is mostly not knowledge, but tips to make their software work.
bragr 2y ago
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.

Maakuth 2y ago

ArchiveTeam (https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ 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 2y ago
If only they were around when my old hangout, www.wota.com, was alive :(
mmooss 2y ago
How does the public access ArchiveTeam's archives?
- Maakuth 2y ago
  They send everything to archive.org and the data is eventually included in the Wayback Machine.

theoa 2y ago

John Walker the founder would grieve as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer) He was a digital hoarder sharer. See: https://fourmilab.ch/ https://fourmilab.ch/

cowboylowrez 2y ago
just nabbed his midi to csv gadgets! seems like an awesome guy!

deckar01 2y ago

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 2y ago

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/ https://the-nordic-letter.com/

sschueller 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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?
    - deckar01 2y ago
      https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/blog/october-2023-product-update-whats-new/#:~:text=With%20this%20new%20enhancement%20to,the%20need%20for%20complicated%20equations https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/blog/october-20....
  - daniel_reetz 2y ago
    Fusion is my daily driver and this is a huge thing for me. Missed it. Thanks.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

fuzzfactor 2y ago

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 2y ago

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.

ghaff 2y ago
Having been involved in creating content and deciding whether it should be retired or not, it really isn't about the money. Product docs can be locked to versions and archived pretty well; most sensible people understand the docs for 1.0 may not apply to version 3.0. But there are a ton of things on a company website that don't really apply to the here and now and will be increasingly out of date. And, if you just leave everything accessible forever, it pollutes the current information. I get that some people prefer everything is just left online but it gets harder and harder for all the folks who just want info that's fairly current.
- gmueckl 2y ago
  You can explicitly move old content to an archive and put big banners on it that it doesn't reflect current information. MS does an OK job of making it obvious that you're looking at documentation for an older product, for example.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    As I wrote, product documentation is versioned anyway so that's fairly straightforward. But a ton of other stuff is variably still relevant and can get in the way of finding what's most relevant and accurate for today. Whenever I would go to update something older, it would invariably take me longer than I planned because even things that were not flat-out wrong often didn't reflect current thinking, terminology, usage, etc.

double0jimb0 2y ago

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 2y ago

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.

sota_pop 2y ago
As a follow-up, it is always sad to see large volumes of community-driven content deleted especially when the motives are likely for selfish or nefarious purposes. Being somewhat familiar with the latest releases, Autodesk has been pushing their cloud services (Forge, or whatever they’re calling it this month) and AI. They are probably deleting the content after having fine-tuned an LLM on it and patting themselves on the back for a job well done.
VyseofArcadia 2y ago
> With that said, Revit does a lot of things well and there are no realistic alternatives. Vectorworks? Archicad? I'm really only familiar with the former, full disclosure I used to work at Vectorworks, and we certainly considered ourselves a competitor to Revit.
- Suppafly 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

_7acn 2y ago

Fun fact: In 2008, Autodesk acquired the competing and highly regarded Softimage, even though it already owned two 3D applications (3ds Max and Maya), only to shut it down six years later.

yacine_ 2y ago

that's why i'm writing my own cad software, dingcad at dingcad.com it will be free and open source

j45 2y ago

I wonder if this had anything to do with the increased LLM traffic to forums that I thought there had been a post about recently.

byyoung3 2y ago

Data is oil.

chaostheory 2y ago

This is likely due to legal reasons. I remember some child protection law where many forums decided to shut down rather than be legally and financially liable for breaking these laws.

altairprime 2y ago

When does the UK forum responsibility law take effect?

mensetmanusman 2y ago

Many don’t realize that the internet is a series of tubes connected to computers that are in the process of breaking.

jfil 2y ago
Real hackers Memento Mori

LeoNatan25 2y ago

What a stupid and ridiculous thing to do in 2024. The budget overhead of storage, serving, traffic, bulletin-board software maintenance and moderation is negligible for a company like Autodesk. This is likely the idea of some idiot middle-management clown that had to show "progress" and "impact" to their own management in order to get a performance bonus.