CFD Online will soon switch forum software. When doing so we also plan to change the forum structure slightly. For ANSYS codes our suggestion is to use the following new structure:

ANSYS
CFX
FLUENT
UDF and Scheme Programming
Pre-Processing
GAMBIT
ICEM


You can see an empty test-forum with this structure here:

http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/ansys

Please note that this is just a test forum and anything posted there will be removed before we move over the forums.

The current FLUENT and CFX forums will be imported into the new FLUENT and CFX forums in the structure above.

What do you think about this new structure? With the consolidation of Ansys, Fluent, CFX and ICEM I think that it is time to modify the current structure a bit. We do not want to create too many different forums because a forum needs a certain number of visitors to stay alive. A forum with too few visitors will quickly self die. Today we have a healthy traffic on both the FLUENT and CFX forums. The traffic in the FLUENT forum is even a bit too large to follow sometimes, so by splitting out a separate UDF & Scheme programming forum and a GAMBIT forum we will hopefully get a better traffic level in all forums. If we open a new GAMBIT forum we should also open an ICEM forum I think.

What do you think about this? We appreciate any comments or suggestions!

-- the CFD Online Team

I prefer a single ANSYS forum. This structure does not include DesignModeler or ANSYS Meshing and will most likely lead to users posting questions in the wrong place. For instance, what appears to be a solver issue may in fact be a geometry or mesh one. Where would you discuss FSI or post questions about how to approach a problem when you don't know which code to use?

In addition, I think it would be useful for CFX users to see FLUENT posts and vice versa. All will be equal one day, so why not start here?

-CycLone

With just one ANSYS forum traffic in that forum will be very high. It would mean > 50 new messages every day. Following this will be very difficult. I don't think that it is a good strategy to only have one such forum. I think that we need to find the right balance; not too many sub-forums, but enough to keep the traffic possible to follow.

How about this:

ANSYS: 1)Pre-Processing

GAMBIT

DESIGN-MODELER

ICEM 2)Processing

FLUENT

CFX 3)Post-Processing

Depending on the traffic, Design-modeler, Gambit and ICEM can be added as sub-forums to the pre-processing forum. Also, CFX and FLUENT can be sub-forums in the Processing forum. Since there aren't many posts related to post-processing, there can be just one main link for it.

Please lets keep CFX and Fluent separate.

1) Most companies only use one of the codes, or if they use both they use them separately, so experts on CFX cannot answer Fluent questions.

2) The integration of the two codes is still a long way away. So why integrate the forums before the codes?

3) Just look at the main forum. In the main forum many people ask 'How can I do XYZ?' without telling us which code they're using. We would just get lots of questions where people don't say whether they are using CFX or Fluent, and for the next few years this *does* matter.

There's my $0.02.

Regards, andy2o

I fully agree. Merging the CFX and FLUENT forums now would just create a lot of missunderstandings.