Autodesk Deletes Old Forum Posts
Autodesk (via Hacker News):
To keep our community efficient and up to date, we’ll be archiving content older than 10 years. We built a policy around document retention to stay relevant to our users and customers.
[…]
The archiving process will start in December and is planned to be completed before the end of [2024].
[…]
Archiving is based on the creation date of the idea or forum thread. The latest activity does not affect the archiving process. All replies and comments within a topic being archived will also be archived.
The title says archiving but the posts indicate Unfortunately, we cannot keep the content, which in my book is DELETING.
[…]
Deleting everything that was originated prior to 10 years ago will destroy a wealth of information that is still viable. This information has not been transferred to the “Help” files and will no longer be searchable, the bookmarked links (published and personal) will no longer be available and the peers who provided this information probably won’t be available ( or not inclined ) to reproduce the information when it is required.
These groups are peer to peer and the answers to peoples questions and solutions to problems is typically provided by users of the products, not by the builders of the products. I consider this action to be an insult to the efforts of the people who have, at their own expense, graciously helped other users over the years.
Previously:
- Lost Internet Archive Accounts
- Slack to Delete Old Messages in Free Accounts
- CNET Deletes Thousands of Old Articles to Game Google Search
- Reddit Deleted Years of Chat History
- Deleting Inactive Twitter Accounts
5 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Let’s get more serious about POSSE, an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties.
Ultimately the platform usually owns the content.
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.
It is well known that hard drives' capacity has only fallen while their prices have only risen over the last decades. Why? I remember my ￡99 ZX-81 came with a massive exabyte SSD only 34 years ago. Nowadays you'd be lucky to buy any Winchester Disk for that amount. /s
If Autodesk can't solve easy problems, why trust them with hard ones? At the very least they could give the data to the web archive.
Laughing and weeping at the same time — as archivists and librarians, we spent years trying to get the techbros to understand "back ≠ archives". Time and again.
And yet they didn't listen, insisting that data migration, disk storage, and records retention policies were trivial. And now the chickens are coming home to roost.
Records retention isn't about chronology, it's about context, as that it what eventually makes an archives an "archives."
And putting your faith in the search engine isn't going to help when the AI kicks in and starts getting creative with results.
