I have obviously completely misunderstood. I completely and unequivocally apologize to the forum owners for my comment about their greed.

@frederik. Stupidity is not the issue here. It is well known that if you place certain signs up then people take notice and act accordingly. A lock is one example, a red triangle is another. If I've been duped, how many noobs have missed out on accessing the content in these forums and subforums?

@richard. Thanks for taking the time to explain. Regarding insulting the forum stewards, I don't remember doing that. As far as I know this is a commercial enterprise run by you and a number of others, so I assume decisions to create a locked area (paid or not) is down to you. I implore you to take this episode seriously and somehow clarify for people how they might use these forums. Nowhere have I ever seen a message about opting in to forums. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Anyhow. I shall beg your pardon and take my leave. Richard if you wish me to edit the original post let me know and I'm happy to do it.

Well, I assumed that the lock icons were part of the premium membership. Simple assumption to make though ultimately the wrong one. Were these lock icons never part of the premium package? I remember questioning it at the time and didn't get an answer to suggest they were anything else. See http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15%26amp;t=55831

You're kidding me? For years I've not had access to SketchyPhysics because I thought I had to pay for it.

Richard said: Where's all these locked areas you mention?"

This is what I'm talking about:

I expected a big old pile-on so that's fine. I did say this was a rant, and I probably have been having a bad week, so please take what I said in that context. This is why it's in the corner bar.

By the way, I'm not claiming to be a big part of the Sketchucation community. I was a fairly big contributor in the days of the old forum, and I liked this forum when Coen was in charge. My main input to the SketchUp community has been two books, which by the way are not written for monetary gain but for the desire to give something back to the community I loved being part of pre 2007 and for a good while after (and hopefully will again). I've evangelized SketchUp in several magazine articles. I've commissioned and edited a SketchUp/Vray book. So that's a community member, maybe not as valuable as 2000+ posts on here, but we makes our choices of where to spend our time.

For a long time this forum has been the Quasi official one, and as such I just don't like that it's monetized in the way it is, and censored in the way it is. Sorry if that offends some of you. It's my opinion. Doubtless my opinions were fixed even more by the email I mentioned. I'm not going to post it up here (Richard) because it's not right to put private communication in public. What I will ask is, please don't squash well meaning community members in this way in future. Just because Sketchucation is selling its own books doesn't mean other authors can't say "Hey, here's my book. Please tell me what you think". You don't squash people who mention rendering software or paid collections of trees, so why squash me when I mention an update to my book? I had to get this off my chest because I'm sore about it and most people reading this will not know that the forum is being censored in this way.

Thanks for pointing me to the new official forums. I didn't know about that and it makes most, if not all, of what I was saying irrelevant. Apologies, I will go take a look over there.

Dear old faithfuls.

I'm posting this in the corner bar because this is going to sound like a drunk old man having a rant. I don't want lots of newcomers to see it, but I do want feedback from the old faithful.

So here it is. I hate what they've done with these forums. I can't stand it, and what they've done has directly impacted on me not contributing my tutorials or help for the last couple of years. I feel like I did back in 2007 when the beautiful community on the old SketchUp Pro forums died overnight.

Today I found out that there's no direct forum search and you have to use the sketchucation search bar at the top which gives you results around the whole Sketchucation website. The time before last I visited they'd locked everything and made you pay for it. There's no Pro only area -- the subforum got removed. Less and less people seem to be visiting, as can be seen from the lack of activity around the 2015 release. It seems like this place has been killed off by greed (of locking parts of the forum down for subscribers only).

What's my problem? I spend a lot of my working day researching tech topics for new books. That means I'm always on forums, sniffing around to see if communities are alive or dead. In all the years I've been doing this I have NEVER come across a locked forum like this one. It's inconceivable to me that Sketchucation should try to monetize in this way while it kills off all the philosophy of openness and willingness to share openly that forums are built on. I just can't stand it. [Edit: To clarify, here's a screenshot of what meets you at the forum index:]

Furthermore, and this is where you'll see I'm partly a bitter old fool at the end of the bar muttering to himself, I feel personally insulted and slighted by the moderators. When I announced the availability of the new version of my popular Architectural Visualization book, a book that is of specific interest to this community, they took the post down and sent me a ranty private mail asking me to pay for advertising space. I just realised while typing this that I'm still feeling wounded by this, 6 months later. Have any of us ever asked the Sketchucation folk to pay us a fee for providing our own content and advice on these forums? Do they not even understand that it is the active forum posters that keep this place alive for their benefit.

So whether I'm just a bitter fool, or whether there's really something wrong happening here, I guess you'll be the judge. As for me, I'm going to reach out to Trimble and ask them to take matters into their own hands and set up a forum for professional SketchUp users. If they do I hope some of you will come along and re-instigate some of the sharing and genuine pioneering that went on around 2007. Most of all I hope it renews my own enthusiasm for SketchUp before it's snuffed out for good.

I had a similar experience 5 years ago when I went to a free training day which turned out to be just a big advert for Revit. That's fair enough as they were paying, but having demonstrated Revit and then failed miserably to render it despite having 10 macbook pros daisy chained to do the render (notice these people have cash to throw around), the floor opened to discussion, and to my surprise everyone just wanted to talk about SketchUp. It was obvious even back then that tools like Revit were losing out seriously because of a CAD program that cost a twentieth of one Revit seat. Similarly at the IT for Construction conference, probably about 8 years ago now, the SketchUp stand was being mobbed and the Revit demonstrations were looking woefully inadequate.

Ah, then I switched on shadows

The new labeling tools are great in Layout. Finally looks like we have the power of Leaders in SketchUp. I've posted about my thoughts http://robindejongh.com/?p=1019

The 64 bit experience is the biggie, although I still can't get it to work. Memory on my 8Mb machine is still capped at 4Mb. Anyone with suggestions?

Hey all. SketchUp 2015 is here!

I've written up some first impressions on my blog at http://robindejongh.com/?p=1019

What do you think of it? I'll be interested to see your impressions of the 64 bit performance increase and the new Label tool.

Best
Robin