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Sunday, September 3, 2017

Revit Ideas Archived Due to Low Support

Autodesk's primary mechanism for gathering user input for new features and changes to Revit is the Revit Ideas site. I wrote about this, in general, in this post: Revit Ideas.

Turns out, if your idea does not get enough support, it will be archived after about six months. I just received several emails, like the example shown here.

Fair enough, the site feels a bit of a mess. So thinning out ideas that do not resonate with others makes sense. For example, my Bind Revit Link - Maintain Phases Option idea only received five votes.


The challenge is...
how to get people to see your idea. My guess is no one cares about maintaining phases, when binding a linked model, until they need to do it and then realize Revit cannot do that. So, if they don't go straight to Revit Ideas and search, or slightly worse - start their own competing idea, the idea will never get traction.

In addition to the reactive user, the proactive user presumably goes to this site occasionally and looks for ideas to vote on. In this scenario, your idea has a small window to get seen by a large audience in the "Newest" category (see image below), which is displayed by default if you browse directly to the site.


However, after the newness wares off, your post is only found by a search; either via specific words or categories. If your idea does get some traction, it will then appear in the "Hot Ideas" or even "Top Voted" section.

While writing this post, I did find out that Ideas are being consolidated, which is great. For example, in my previous post linked above, I pointed people to an Idea I started to be able to zoom in schedules. That link now goes to another users idea and my comments have been migrated as well.

All of this is not a big deal to me... just sharing some thoughts as I reflect on the dozen "Archived" announcement emails I received before the long weekend here in the States.