Built in defaults

[MikeJarosz]

Where does Chris Zoog fit in? He was running his site from his garage!

[Steve_Stafford]

Where does Chris Zoog fit in? He was running his site from his garage!

He started Zoogdesign and the Revit forum he hosted on it in 2003 and yes it was on a server in his basement. Membership grew to between 1500-2000 members during the year after he started it. Fwiw, RevitCity started up at almost the same time, a month later (or earlier, not positive at the moment) I think. As membership grew Chris began discussing merging his community into AUGI's. He was a bit worried about the bandwidth our group was starting to require. AUGI was already in the process of rebuilding their forum structure so in May of 2004 Zoogdesign was merged into AUGI's forums. That is why you'll occasionally come across an attached file or image that has a Zoogdesign URL. Any posts dated prior to 2004 came from his site. "It" was the first product focused user community established in the forums here. The rest were developed over the following couple of years. The role I play here at AUGI still is entirely because Chris Zoog made me an admin in his Revit forums at Zoogdesign to begin with.

Fwiw, there was a vibrant small user community hosted at another site called RUGI (was www.rugi.org) from 2000-2002/3. It was created by two brothers and supported by Revit Technology Corporation during its two years before Autodesk bought it. It also provided a central place to upload and download content. When Autodesk completed the acquisition the content stored there was eventually moved to AUGI's Exchange which never fully materialized as a content sharing site. RevitCity also copied/stored all of the content from RUGI. I think that's the only place you can truly get all the way back to some of the earliest content made for Revit, though I'm not sure you'd want it at this point.

There was also a user community at the newsgroup alt.cad.revit. Revit's earliest users hung out at all of these places for the most part. The more recent RevitForum came into being when AUGI was working through its own issues related to the forums (and other things) and a few of the Revit/AUGI members weren't happy with the way it was handled. Their response was to start their own forum too. I regard all these places like pubs. We all have our preferences for where we choose to hang out for a drink with friends. The more resources like these that there are the more betterer it is for Revit overall.