Just in case anyone is wondering they didn’t implement any, as far as I can see, of the plethora of requests that where asked for in the “3dExperience Swym” forum". They are still asking for feedback and they promise THIS TIME they’ll listen
I can tell you from relevant experience that LISTENING is hard work, but MAKING DECISIONS and DOING SOMETHING are much harder. Aside from resources, that’s the big difference between here and there.
There were a bunch of people making a bunch of suggestions on the existing forum over there and not many of them were implemented. The major ones brought up that essentially make the forum unusable for large groups were not even considered.
Get this i got a message saying I’m an Author but still can 't do anything over there, what a confusing Web interface on 3DSSYM, not even worth the time to use. Worst interface ever seen, I can even make a better web site with Wordpress!! So i voted for this site over there!!
I hesitate to participate much in this discussion, but out of curiosity I went over there. I couldn’t be all THAT bad, right? I got signed in easily enough. I got to vote in the “who’s doing this right” poll. That was fun. After that I try to browse around, which is difficult enough, and all I see is a wall of hate. People really don’t like what’s happening. And then my “bell” had a couple of dings in it, so I clicked on it:
image.png
Huh?
I haven’t been over there to ask for anything. I don’t think I’ve posted anything at all. And suddenly I’m an author?
I kinda feel bad for everybody. Employees. Customers. Everybody. This has the look of something that just didn’t get much public discussion. It’s like you’re in someone’s private nightmare. it all means something to someone, but figuring it out based on what most of us know about social media and public forums … It’s a little embarrassing.
The public outcry from the V6 problem about 10 years ago eventually caused a lot of backpedaling at DS, and I imagine someone or some group wound up with a lot of egg on their face. But this. This is even worse than 10 years ago. They are going to start losing customers if this is the new direction of the company. It’s painful to watch. I don’t even know how they would start to correct something like this. It’s not like they missed by an inch. Somebody had an idea that just didn’t translate into reality very well.
matt,
I know you’ve been busy with this forum, yes you are correct. People aren’t happy over there. And they haven’t migrated but a tiny portion of the old forum over there. I made a few test searches under my name and then I tried Deepak…Because let’s face it, yeah I contributed to the old forum, but half of it was sarcasm…allright, allright…most of it was sarcasm… But, Deepak has a VAST amount of VERY useful and informative posts and I only got 5 results from a simple search for “Gupta”. (not fair to mention you Deepak and not ping ya, gupta9665 ).
I agree the screenshot you posted is off putting to say the least, but they had to delete peoples accounts to reassociate them to the forum posts or something like that…and if that were the only problem, I think it’d be forgivable, but I agree, it’s just one more thing piled on.
AFAIK, what they’ve got over there is SO much closer to the SW subreddit than this forum. If us forum users preferred that, we’d have been on the subreddit…So, it’s going to be interesting to watch the water over at the Swamp circle the toilet bowl…The part I’m most sad about is that the new users will probably end up there asking questions to deaf ears, at least for a while, until enough content gets here to guide them here. The SW forum really helped me a LOT when I first learned SW.
Completely tangent to the subject at hand I see new “align” and “float” tags, I’ll have to play with them and see what they do…Try getting something like that over at the Swamp and see it sent to R&D where it’ll linger for who knows how long…But, I’m not bitter…
Oh, I posted this in the old forum, DS tried to fit the round peg that is a forum into the square hole which is their platform:
CQ1m.gif
Admitting they made a big mistake, and moving the old forum over to a platform that actually works would be a good start. Don’t get me wrong, I like it here, and wouldn’t leave even if they did, but I’ve always respected people who can admit it when they make a mistake instead of forging ahead hoping it will somehow be okay.
If you’re in a hole it’s usually not a good idea to keep digging.
Good ones can and in fact the really good ones do it willingly, quickly and sincerely. I also don’t think this is a “C” level executive thing. Society as a whole has somehow put the status of “Being in error” on the same level as committing murder or other capital offenses. People dig in on things like which way the toilet paper roll should go as if their life depended on it.
End result is we spend more energy on “Finding who’s wrong” and “Who’s to blame” then actually fixing the problems.
Glenn, you are bang on about admitting a mistake and fixing it!!
I don’t think I am bound by an NDA so I’m going say that I am included in a focus group of about eight forum users along with Ryan Priddy and Suzanne Locke to discuss the new forum. We have had bi-weekly meetings for the last three months. We only met a couple of times before that last fall. From the start we were all over them about forcing this mess on us, asking waaaaay too late for any input, and then not being able to do anything significant about it. We all know Ryan is only the messenger in all of this and we’ve treated him with that respect, but we have not been shy (you guys know me, right?) about telling them what we think.
Two weeks ago in the meeting I asked point-blank if such things as the Google indexing were technically possible. Ryan finally said it was, but that it was not going to happen. I confirmed then that everything about the 3DSwamp forum was based on decisions by people at DSS/SWX and not by technical limitations. Ryan did confirm that and added that the decisions were coming from from VERY high up in DSS. VERY VERY high up, but he stopped short of naming the CEO.
As soon as the meeting was over I got on the forum and posted this:
image.png
And we DID make some noise! And just a day or so later WE DID GET THEM TO INCLUDE GOOGLE INDEXING!! Alin is part of that focus group and just a couple of days ago validated that our noise was what got their attention. It was a great point that decisions are different from technical impossibilities. Decisions can be changed and we got a big bad decision changed!
Glenn, you (I hope) would be proud of me. In yesterday’s meeting just as we were ending I told Ryan that there comes a time when a company has to admit that what they did, or tried to do, was an abject failure and that they would be much better off fixing it by scrapping what they’ve got and starting over. They don’t even have to publicly admit they “goofed”, just fix it, despite how much time and money they have put into the failed mess. EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THAT GROUP AGREED (although Suzanne was muted and without video and Ryan was the recipient).
I honestly want the 3DSwamp forum to be a great forum, but I don’t think DSS will get out their own way and do enough to fix it.
No doubt this decision came from high up. I can see the thought process, they want the SolidWorks userbase to buy in the 3dx works version and the 3dx platform because “Its the future!!!..of our revenue stream”. So hey, let them use it as their community forum and they will see how great it is and maybe we can upsell them from that old tired desktop app to our new snazzy nebulous cloud tool. Surely our built in cloud collaboration UI isn’t much different than whatever those users do on that bulletin forum thing or whatever it’s called.
All the crap forced on us came from VERY high up. That is why I was calling out Gian Paolo Bossi and Bernard Charles. Yes, they endorsed the stinking pile of bad decisions.
If those two offered to buy me a beer I’d hold out until they first said they made a mistake and wanted to correct it and wanted to hear from us passionate and dedicated users. Then I’d have them pick up the tab for everyone in the place, just to see if they were serious. (Of course they would do that because it isn’t coming out of their pocket anyway!) Notice the lack of purple text here.
I met GPB at the LAST SWX**World** in Los Angeles, 2018. It was at the breakout session for the TTL, the first time the TTL had been taken off the main stage. I have to hand it to him, we were a tough crowd, but he was well informed and surprisingly knowledgeable about the issues we were bringing up. I was impressed. Today, with what I have learned in the last few weeks, . . . To only say I am disappointed would be an April Fool’s joke! I am flat out pissed at him and the bunch that is standing by their stupid platform and trying to act like they are graciously showing us the way to the future. Pffftt.
I felt flattered to be asked to be in their focus group. Reflecting on it now it was a HUGE waste of my time and quite insulting. Try this on for size:
“Hey, Jason! How about giving me a couple hours of your time every other week? We really want to hear your ideas on how we can make this great thing better!” “But we have NO intention of incorporating any of your suggestions. We are doing this to say we tried to fight for you.”
I don’t know what color that last paragraph should be. What’s the color for fed-up?
DennisD They can say “we consulted with prominent members of the Solidworks community before we rolled it out”. That way they can throw you guys under the bus (subtly of course).
[quote=jcapriotti post_id=2412 time=1617314853 user_id=91] @DennisD They can say “we consulted with prominent members of the Solidworks community before we rolled it out”. That way they can throw you guys under the bus (subtly of course).
[/quote]
Yep, I think if they tried that they would get this from the whole group: