Keeping Up To Date with Autodesk Discussion Forums

Since various divisions supply me with technologies to showcase on Autodesk Labs, I wrote this for my fellow teammates. I wrote and sent this to them on April 1. I decided to share this with It's Alive in the Lab readers. Labs technology previews are all about feedback. Feedback can come via email, discussion forums, or social media. Though I don't respond to all of the feedback, I try to keep tabs on everything and make sure someone responds. This blog posting describes how to keep tabs on feedback from an Autodesk discussion forum.

One way to keep tabs is to visit the discussion forum regularly and peruse for unanswered posts. If you are logged in with your Autodesk Single Sign-on credentials, the discussion forums will show you how many and which forums posts you have not read. These appear under the New column.

Instead of this approach, another way to keep tabs on a forum is to leverage the RSS capability of Autodesk discussion forums. I use Google Chrome as my browser. In addition to being a browser of web pages, Chrome has an RSS reader built-in. It is accessible from the upper right.

Knowing you have an RSS reader, you can subscribe to an Autodesk discussion forum's RSS feed. In this case, I am subscribing to the forum for DesignScript that appears in the Autodesk Labs section of the Autodesk discussion forums.

When you select Subscribe to RSS feed, you see the raw feed from the forum:

You can then click on the big gray plus sign of the RSS area to add the feed to the list of RSS feeds you monitor:

After doing so, the green check indicates that you are following the feed.

You can see that DesignScript topics has been added to my list.

You can click on the forum feed to see a list of postings at any time.

Now anytime a new message is posted, my Google Chrome UI is updated to alert me by showing a red 1 when there is one new item in my feeds.

I can click on my reader to see which feed has the new item:

I can click on the feed name, in this case, DesignScript topics, and see the post:

I can click on the NEW item to go right to that post in the forum.

Using this method any team member can stay abreast of what gets posted in the forum associated with his/her technology preview and respond swiftly with an answer.

First responders are alive in the lab.