I’m curious as to whether the intent exists to reclaim the voluminous amount of information that was discussed in the now discontinued SketchUp Forum that has been replaced by the current SketchUp Community (forum) or perhaps those discussions were made available on some sort of archival platform? What happened to all of that data?
I’ve noticed in the last week or so that I can no longer access any of the posts on the old google fora. Seems a shame to loose all that data.
BTW, good luck getting an answer here, it seems this category is where questions come to die.
Shep
The Google Groups foums is still there and accessible for the time being.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/SketchUp
Was there another forum after that one? I know there was the @Last forum first. Did the Google forums follow, or was there an intermediate?
Ah, so the forum prior to this was the google products sketchup forum, which is not accessible.
Wasn’t there…
- @Last
- old Google Groups 2006–2009 (remember the original design with rounded gray corners around posts?)
- Pistachio 2009–2011
-
Google Product Forums 2011–2014 (based on new Google Groups)
SketchUp is not member anymore of Google’s Product Forums, the data could not been archived by Wayback Machine or mailing list archives. - Discourse 2014–2038
You been to the future and back?!
my comment at the concerning SU blog post: Let’s have a discourse about SketchUp
“BTW, good luck getting an answer here, it seems this category is where questions come to die.”
It seems that you are correct, sir. It appears that the Google Product Forum for SketchUp was archived for a brief duration, but no longer exists today. It is regrettable to have lost such a valuable resource. I take some solace in the knowledge that the same information may be derived from current sources, but it would be great if one could merely type in a subject of concern and be reasonably assured of an affirmative response from a cumulative repository of all things SketchUp.
Hey folks,
The unfortunate truth is that the Google Product Forums version of our community were using an internal option for forums that was only available to Google Products, which we are no longer. As the folks at Google continued to develop their proprietary platform they reached a point where our forum was in a format that would no longer be compatible with their product and the only choices were to convert our forum to their new format, or to archive it. The former wasn’t an option because, as mentioned above, we’re not a Google product. We were supposed to have migrated off of their GPF months ago and their changes pushed us to an aggressive time table to get to a new community, that’s how we ended up on Discourse (a great choice) in August. Unfortunately it also meant that the time in Archive state was sadly brief.
While we’re working to get an archived version of the forums we might be able to reference, I can’t promise when or if it’ll go online, it’s a lot of data in a cumbersome format. The data is just not available online anymore, we don’t have access to Google servers to share it. While I do hope to get it into a searchable format again, I encourage you to make the best of this forum today, if we need new answers we can make them.
Cheers!
this service might come in handy than.
I’ll keep that bookmarked, that does look like a great resource… hopefully the data they send me matches the options they have available.
It is good to learn about this potential resource to recover materials from the old forum. Hopefully, it is still possible to find the posts so they may be migrated to an accessible location.
anything new?..
in reference to
did they ever provided the data or what is the status?
The data was provided, but in a format which isn’t easily accessible nor transferrable. We don’t have an engineering resource to build a tool to extract the data and then import it into Discourse. At this point, as it’s been 2 years now, it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to justify spending resources on this data. Pretty awesome that it’s easily found in the Internet Archive though!
The internet archive doesn’t go back despite showing links that one could look up things in the old forum. Beside there are no images nor downloadable SKPs - I tried. Most of the old forums are still hosted with Google Groups though. Gallery, Corner Bar, Materials and Components, and Plugins are gone though.
While I did find two valuable old posts with most of the images stored on my HD, there are a few more I’m hankering to recover - like ones on the nifty animation techniques with Soap Skin & Bubble and a few others…