Friday, March 16, 2018

Revit Forums - Past and Present

Revit-focused support forums are an amazing tool we can all use to ask questions and search for answers. From "the original" Zoog Design Newsgroup to the contemporary BIM Forum, there is some rich history here.

These are the forums I typically use today:

Additionally, if you sign up for the Autodesk Revit beta program, you also get access to a cool...
forum to discuss the new features under development with other beta testers and Autodesk staff. This stuff is top secret and cannot be discussed with anyone outside of the beta program. Anyone can sign up, but you have to then be selected... and I am not sure what the internal process is there, to be honest.

You can sign up for the beta program here:

Now for a little trip down memory lane...

Zoog Design Newsgroup

I recently came across my user name and password for Zoog Design Newsgroup from 2003. This first Revit forum was start by Christopher Zoog that same year. He literally had a computer at home that he used for the newsgroup (i.e. forum). I recall a post where Chris apologized for the service being down and that he had to run home and reboot the server; similar to this one: Periodic Outages.
Some of who would become the "usual suspects" posted in the first thread... and then later the next year would be the last post (more on that in a moment):


AUGI Adds Revit Forum

All the Zoog posts where ported over to AUGI; knowledge preserved. AUGI becomes the go-to place for Revit knowledge sharing. Steve gets the first word in...
  • Steve Stafford gets the first word in on AUGI: Welcome!
This forum is still very active and a good place to go today. In case you don't know, AUGI stands for Autodesk User Group International. But, it is not owned by Autodesk.


RevitForum.org was created

The  RevitForum.org initially hit the scene amid some AUGI controversy. As I recall, the AUGI board was switching to a new service provider for the forum and all the old posts were going to be lost. The old service provider claimed they owned the data and wanted money for it - I also recall Phil Read posting, that he would personally pay for the data. A lot of folks where not happy about that and thus, Revit Forum came to life.
This forum is also still very active and a good place to go today.


Autodesk Forums

The Autodesk forums are also a good place to go. I do not know exactly when the Revit section started. I have seen Autodesk staff post on all the forums listed in this post, so there is nothing extra special about Autodesk's forum compared to the others. It probably has a lot more 'new user' questions as that would likely be the first forum they would find via Autodesk's website.


Social Media 

We have access to a lot of great information and experienced users via the forums and social media. Even LinkedIn and Twitter have a lot of great, just in time, information to share on BIM and Revit! And somehow, Aaron Maller manages to be super active on all of them!




And to help keep a lot of this data summed up there are two good 'weekly roundups' I follow... Carl Storms from The BIMsider and Dmitry Chubrik from BIM2B.ru (I use Google's translate tool for this one:)).




Thanks to everyone who shares there knowledge in the inter-webs!

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