I don’t know either…
Since the Solidworks Forum is moving to the platform and nobody knows how to use the platform a little guidance is needed to retrieve this information…So, show me how to do it.
Edit to Add: As has been pointed out below, there’s a method to search for the old content over there using the “Search this Page” functionality:
image.png
If I figure out how to refine search results by using things like & to force the results to include all words or - to exclude other words, I’ll post that here too, when I figure it out.
Wildcard works eg. _tes_* returns test, tesselation, etc.
? - If you know the post contains a ? escape it eg. if you are searching for what? type what?
" - Double quotes searches for an exact phrase
Will return results including only the exact word, eg. +cadforum would return results for cadforum, but not cadforum.net
Minus sign will exclude posts with the words with a minus in front of them
I haven’t played with this to see how it will drill down, but it’s encouraging, if you can remember the words for what you are looking to find.
Edit to Add (6:25pm 4/2/2021)
Good News! All those important COVID posts by Frederick_Law may be backed up at the platform:
image.png
I’d suggest we keep posting those posts over there, but it’s just too difficult to be worth it. I was curious what all they were backing up, and searched for a post I did on the old KD, and it’s not showing. So, I’m curious what they’re doing and how it’s being indexed…But, it appears they brought over some of the noise along with the good stuff.
Ummmm. We are here to ditch the 3DSwym. So a bunch of rebels here probably don’t know or want to know about how to use it.
But then again it strikes me that maybe you’re just throwing a match into this tinderbox. In which case, troll away. Nothing sells newspapers like a trainwreck.
No, not trolling. I would like to be able to retrieve old posts. I have learned a lot from the forum. SO, it would be good to have a few people that know how to get in there and find things. But, you may be right, as Kevin Quigley pointed out, it takes 11 (at a minimum) steps to create a support ticket… All of that information may just become a sunk cost.
Thanks again for setting this up. It is already infinitely better than the platform.
At some point, shouldn’t google be our friend? You should be able to search out stuff that you remember. Unless all of that is also behind a bot firewall. But DS wouldn’t be that stupid, I don’t think. It’s a public forum, you want the public to be able to find stuff. Google may be your best bet.
On the side topic of saving archived content you wanted to keep from the old forum -
I figured out how sometimes the old forum’s View As PDF action sometimes works and sometimes does not.
If the thread is less than one page long, then it works fine. It shows you a PDF of the thread. You can save this.
If the thread is more than 1 page long, then it shows you an altered web page that still has the pages control. You could print that to PDF, and repeat for subsequent pages. What is odd, confusing is that its address bar shows the page called [filename].pdf although it isn’t a pdf, and the browser can save it as an html file.
This is a problem to me because a majority of the best threads, such as the “What are your most impressive tricks” thread, are many many pages. Same thing with the long SSP thread.
You know, even if it doesn’t, we will have here enough resources to rebuild a lot of that info and filter some of the junk that got in there as well. In any case, they say they are bringing it all forward, and google should allow access to the information in its new location.
We can hope for the best, but I’m not confident DS will allow google to index it. From DS’ perspective they want new accounts and participation in the platform and I’m guessing they can hold the forum data hostage to force that participation. If people can just search in Google and find the info, why participate?
It probably works in your favor because people will always choose the easiest path and this forum is pretty darn easy.
Ok, whoever suggested that DS is going to hide the forum data behind a login was correct. I thought it would be crazy to keep google from indexing all that information, but Priddy laid it out “priddy” explicitly (sorry, just can’t help myself with stuff like that). The new forum won’t be google indexed. It’s insane.
Good luck searching and navigating anything on the 3dswym site. While people might not all migrate over here, I think its safe to say that most won’t migrate over to 3dSwym, at least not for long. It’s own UI will drive people elsewhere, be it here, Eng Tips, Reddit, etc.
That’s why I created this thread. That platform is awful. I want some concise instructions on how to retrieve old posts. The SW forum is a gold mine…too bad DS decided bury it 5 miles below a steaming pile of 3DEXPERIENCE excrement.
I don’t know about eng tips, but you can’t post files to Reddit. So, that one is out. IIRC, eng tips isn’t formatted as a “forum” and is probably why the SW forum took off in the first place. This forum has some potential…DS is shooting themselves in the foot.
