Historical SketchUp Application Release Notes are GONE!

Historical SketchUp Application Release Notes are GONE!

Today going to look up a release date for an old SketchUp version, I find that only the last 3 years are listed.

So I think "Oh, they must have moved all the older ones over to the Older Release Notes page. I have this bookmarked as well.

But NO … I now get an “Access Denied” page.
"You are not authorized to access this page."

UPDATE

The Older Release Notes link now redirects to the new list of PDF documents.


WHY ? Why is this someone’s “good idea”?
I am always looking up items in the older release notes!

Why did y’all do this?!

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oh yeah… for us doing tech support on this forum, it’s kinda valuable to be able to go back and check something.

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I think this is part of the broader implementation of the “3 years support policy”.
But honestly, I’ve never seen a more unnecessary change than this. What was the problem with seeing the older versions on the same page? A mystery…

The fact that we cant see older release notes, can be just a bug, or deliberately they want to hide it.

I hope the Ruby API will not be affected. :folded_hands:

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@dezmo That page was getting pretty big, holding all those old release notes, so likely just a tidy up. Also moving the release notes from current to older does take some work.

There is this great site out there that just doesn’t want to forget though…

You could always try petitioning the support team at https://help.sketchup.com/en/contact-support/technical-question/form, they may not have realised that they are useful at all…

I would have copied them to the “older” page before removing them from the “current” page.

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Dear @daniel_pidcock , Thank you very much for the suggestion. Unfortunately, however, I am having difficulty filling out the contact form. For example,

  • I cannot fit the above mentioned problem into any of the categories
  • I do not want to give my phone number
  • I do not want to get marketing information
  • I do not want my personal information to be received by the local authorized reseller (because they have absolutely nothing to do with this issue.)
  • I do not agree to be contacted by an authorized reseller

Since you are a SketchUp Team Member, I assume you have a better chance of speaking to support team directly. Would you be so kind to tell them about problem mentioned in a first post?

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Fair enough, I had forgotten that the form asked for marketing permission including from resellers.

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So “We won’t help you unless you indirectly pay us with your information to resell.” God I hate the internet and marketing. Imagine what humanity could do with all the wasted time consumed while being force fed product pitches everywhere we turn. Never mind the dollars/resources attached to creating and distributing all the garbage content marketing generates… Oh ya, and now we have AI to make it all more efficient at subverting our free will and taking our money. Just say no to advertisements kids…

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I have opened a Labs issue (where I unintentionally misspelled your name.)

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There are some broken links due to some rearranging happening on the help center. The team is aware of it and actively addressing the re-direct issue. You can find the past release notes for end of support versions of SketchUp here: https://help.sketchup.com/en/accounts-and-administration/release-notes-unsupported-versions-sketchup

Hope that helps and clears things up a bit!

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Okay Ted, thank you the information.

But I fail to see why this change was needed.

  • You made it harder to find the information. (Separated from the “current” release notes.)

  • You chopped up the information into a multitude of PDF files.

I’ll likely need to download them all and create something that is more easily searched and used.

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we could have a pinned thread here, with all the versions in separate messages. no replies, discussions, just info ?

Hey Dan,

Thanks for catching this and bringing it up. We have corrected the error and will always provide access to older version release notes. You can now find them here: https://help.sketchup.com/en/accounts-and-administration/release-notes-unsupported-versions-sketchup

I would love to understand more about how users utilize older release notes if you are interested in sharing those insights.

Thank you - AG

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When a user comes to the forum and asks how this or that works, we can check if the version they are using already included the certain feature.

I know that you no longer support old versions, but with the current - absolutely unnecessary changes - the search has become very difficult and takes much more time.

You spent a lot of time creating pdfs, which slows down the search considerably.

Besides, Ruby API changes are sometimes easier to follow in the “main” release notes.

This reminds me, if you want to do the Ruby API Release Notes in a similar way, I ask (beg) you not to do PLEASE!

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Another reason: Often a user on an old version will have an issue and state they are using a certain build. Looking in the historical release notes, we may find that there are newer builds of their version in which the problem was fixed.
We can direct them to update their version to a newer build, or even to a later version where the issue was later fixed.

The build numbers on the release notes are (were) valuable to help us help others. I cannot be opening 10 separate PDF files just to get at the build numbers!


Sometimes just for argument’s sake we may wish to look at the added features when a forum post makes claim that yearly releases haven’t added anything good in several years.
Usually, these claims as off base. And we can use the release notes (or links to them) to refute the claims.


In answering many questions and posts in the forum, I have many times posted links into the release notes webpages.

Now all these previous links in the forum are likely invalid!

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Thanks for your insight. The feedback on the link was very helpful and we have now created a path for users to find older release notes from the current release notes page so previous links are still helpful. https://help.sketchup.com/en/release-notes

Should we consider this the best you can offer?

I’m trying to make the best of what we have now. So, I downloaded all pdfs and merged it to one file. Perhaps easier to search in it.

SketchUp_Desktop_older_ver_release_notes_22-7.pdf (3.3 MB)

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One thing that is always useful is what the system requirements are for the specific versions.

The system requirements only specify the most recent version, but often that might not work on a machine that another supported version will.

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I actually used this feature a few weeks ago, my student had an old mac, her subscription allowed me to install SU20 after checking what version would run.