Goodbye Autodesk Newsgroups

I found the Autodesk newsgroups back in 1995, and learned a lot from many people over the years. This was way before the forums of Augi, CadTutor, Cadalyst, etc. In fact the main reason for starting CAD Panacea (and my earlier, now idle Blogspot site), was to give back to the community for all of the information I picked up over the years in the Autodesk newsgroups.

Back to the subject.... Autodesk has decided to terminate the NNTP based newsgroups, and move 100% to HTML based forums. I'll reserve judgment until I see the new interface, but I don't see how this can be an improvement. NNTP is text based, isn't slowed down by avatars or advertising, and doesn't require registration. Here is an FAQ from Autodesk on the matter.

It looks like Adobe killed their NNTP forums about a year ago, and got some strong feedback ([1] | [2]) in the process. I guess time will tell how this works out for Autodesk, and their users.

I found one thread in the Civil 3D newsgroup about this and almost all of the replies are negative. I like one users comment which was basically "KISS".

I wonder if Autodesk studied the amount of tech support issues that never cross their desk because of the free support given by current NNTP based users, a large part of which it sounds like may move on rather than continue to participate? Ah, I'm probably exaggerating....

If you do want to continue on with the new HTML based forums, and you want to preserve your NNTP based username, fill out this form.

Feel free to leave a comment.