CAD - Forum Organization.

This is just a suggestion but it seems a bit unorganized that we have CAD/Inventor and CAD/Solidworks but no other “general” CAD forum. Would it be practical to have the forums set up like below?

CAD[Forum] - Program Crossing Threads
Solidworks [Sub-Forum]
Inventor [Sub-Forum]
OTHER CAD Programs [Sub-Forum]

That way, you can also have threads about several CAD programs under the general CAD forums but for specifics there would be specific forums? Because for example, I had a question about Pro/ENGINEERING and spent 30 minutes trying to figure out which forum it went under and than I just gave up because it was a catch-22; neither CAD forum is appropriate.

For those that want a visual, the setup would be like the “FIRST-related Organizations” forum.

Thanks,
Pavan.

Still have that Pro/E question?

No ma’am, it got answered weeks ago. Thank you though.

Sounds reasonable … I’ll look into moving them.

All set.

Just a note: the Pro/E forum should probably be labelled “Pro/ENGINEER”, without the “-ING”.

While we are on the topic of CAD. AutoCAD was around before Inventor. So if anything Inventor should be a sub-section of an AutoCAD file. To put Inventor as the head group is just a bit insulting to the history of CAD in general. Personally, I prefered it when there was just a CAD group and we did not try to divide it up into tiny segments. For one thing, I personally am not going to notice any threads in the ProE section just because it is a hassle to have to check three sections for one topic. Can’t we just go back to the way it was. It is not like it was overly used like some of the larger sections that could use dividing such as general forum. Sorry for ranting, I just get annoyed by having to navigate a maze of little sections without much to information.

This isn’t a forum dedicated to the history of CAD, so it’s doubtful that acknowledgment of which software came first will be of any use in the hierarchy of forums. Also, Inventor isn’t based on AutoCAD; you’re probably thinking of Mechanical Desktop, which is basically AutoCAD’s interface with assembly support and more refined 3-D functions. Inventor was built from the ground up with rendered 3-D solid modelling in mind, and assembly support—if one were arguing the history of CAD software, one might say that it was intended as a lower-cost response to CATIA, UG and Pro/E.

That much is definitely a fair point, however, I suspect that the request to subdivide occurred because the forum was originally marked “CAD/Inventor” or something like that. We probably won’t see until next season (when ChiefDelphi gets busy again) whether there’s enough traffic in those program-specific forums to make them worthwhile.