As a start, I would like to acknowledge that Thingiverse is nothing without its members: the millions of engineers, creators, designers, Makers, Makerspaces, Fablabs, service bureaus, educators, students, and more generally everybody who loves Thingiverse. We definitely felt this love for what Thingiverse represent when we hosted a AMA on the 17th February 2026, shortly after the acquisition of Thingiverse by MyMiniFactory.
Following this AMA, and as the Thingiverse team, we need to know what we should be building, and the only way to do that is by listening to the members.
As such, we set up this Forum with the primary focus being to give a space for the team and members to share and exchange about the future of Thingiverse (we initially had done that via Thingiverse Groups, but it was not well adapted).
As a start on this forum, you’ll be able to find new features or services released on Thingiverse, what the Thingiverse team is working on and feedback from members.
You can also contact the team at the existing Support contact form, but we would love to hear your feedback shared here, for all to engage with.
This is great! I’ve been on Thingiverse for over seven years now, and it’s great to see it back on the up and up. I especially appreciate the removal and discouragement of AI models. Looking forward to what’s next!
Hi thingiro, I’ve tried using the group feature but i kind of abandoned because it is too broken. My main objective was to make a collection with designs related to scientific research and invite the various creators to join up. The underlying idea is that there are many project out there that are very high quality but get little attention because they are too specialized (in research its all the time). Since they get buried under millions of models nobody is aware of their existence. Groups and their public collections would be a great way to make curated collections of specific subjects and give a bit more visibility to technical projects.
For research in particular, just knowing what models exist out there opens new research project possibilities.
But when trying to add objects to the collection it bugs: the process goes on normally but the objects never appear. So that group is just an empty shell.
I follow another group with a similar purpose “DIY Bio Laboratory” (although its not quite the same project they are kind of crawling under racks and holders) but their is a similar issue with adding any new object to the collection.
I’ve had a really similar experience to @remi_rafael . I created a group a while back and ran into issues where posts wouldn’t reliably go through, and Thingies weren’t being added correctly when I tried:
I ended up stepping away from it, but I’d really love to see groups working more smoothly again. Spaces like this are important, especially for niche areas like fractals and sacred geometry where it can otherwise be hard to find like-minded people.
I’d definitely be willing to give it another shot and help document any issues I run into. It’s been a while, so I don’t remember exactly what was going wrong, but I do remember trying to create discussion topics and add objects, then running into problems each time.
In my opinion, when groups work well, they become one of the best parts of a platform.
Agreed! The only thing AI is good for is discouraging creativity and consuming large masses of vital resources. One of my favorite features of Thingiverse is this awesome forum!
I appreciate forums, but this one is severely lacking in some functions and the thank you for contributing button that just popped up over what I am typing is annoying as hell. I am not sure what platform this is but it looks like the old Dolphin from Boonex.
At least give us a few theme options including one that is FULL SCREEN WIDTH. This is a forum for people who will likely be showing images if they are asking for help with models or solving 3d print problems.
It popped up over the box you type into when I was writing my first two posts. Its not happening now. But it was very irritating.
Discourse is a mistake, in my opinion. I know its popular among certain communities but it has severe limitations compared to true forum packages. Compare the posting options here to something like XenForo or even vBulletin (no I do not work for either) or numerous others.
One example would be using multiple browser instances. I have another window open to this thread so I can read the stuff above my post (when I expand this window it covers it up instead of being able to scroll it like a real forum) and I get a popup that its being edited in another window. Annoying when you are responding point by point to something someone else wrote.
It does save it properly as a draft but every time I swap windows I have to click either Reload or Ignore. Its rather clumsy.
For a site the size of Thingiverse I imagine you are paying the Enterprise rate for Discourse and have fewer features. The one thing that Discourse does have that others do not is the chat tie in, but since chat is not publicly searchable that is not as much of a boon as you would first think.
If someone asks a question and gives an answer in chat, nobody will ever locate that answer from a google search.
A simple function that is missing is an automated quote button. I can copy and paste your text into a quote box, or I can highlight parts of your text and quote that though I suspect most people do not know that.
But first I have to shrink the box I am typing in so I can see your post, and when I highlight your text and click Quote it immediately puts that text in this window.
XenForo for example has a Quote button right next to the Reply button. So if you are responding to someone you just click that and it adds it to a buffer.
If you then quote multiple people or multiple posts by highlighting and right clicking you get a window that you can change the order of the quotes before they are inserted into your post. That looks like this
Thanks for this feedback on forum software. We picked Discourse because it is indeed popular, we were able to add SSO, so Thingiverse members don’t have to re-create an account. It’s good to get us started and collect feedback on the features ideas, feature release, etc. You seem to have done a lot of work in forums and I thank you for sharing your feedback, but at this point, we’ll use Discord to get the conversation going and help us refine the Thingiverse roadmap.
It is, but you have to think about what the goals are and how your site is going to work. Discourse is hugely popular on Minecraft mod sites for developers of mods for instance. But Minecraft mods don’t need as long of a post life for information. Versions are updated so often that the need for long term post retention is not a huge concern, because the information is often outdated sometimes within just weeks or even days.
A site like this is different. If I need advice about a specific printer model that information is good for likely years to come, because that is a piece of hardware sitting on my desk and there are thousands of other people with that exact same piece of hardware and they are not going to replace it every month.
Lots of platforms have that function and there is even a package called OAuth built into many of the biggest packages. I just looked and Discourse seems to use OpenID which is basically the same function.
Lots. Decades worth. Mostly on gaming related sites but a few technical sites as well. My big site is fairly niche related to a specific game that is not nearly as popular as it once was but has 14-15 million posts going back to 2003 and the original install under a different domain name goes back even further than that. A decade or so ago we were getting thousands of new posts a day, not so much currently but we are in between major releases for at least the next 2 years.
I hear you, its new ground. And I do not want to come off like this is some sort of gripe session and everyone knows better than you do. You obviously know more about the inner workings and goals of Thingiverse than any of the rest of us do.
Discourse will work as a basic platform. Just about any forum package out there would do that. The question is do you want more out of it? Time will tell on that one. A few suggestions that apply no matter which package you use:
Community Link
There is no dedicated community link on the main site. I found the forum because of the rotating header. But there is no permanent link unless I am just not seeing it. Put one up next to Explore and Categories on the main site.
Subforums
You need at least a few. A couple for design where people can ask questions about how to do something. Figure out which programs are used by the most people and create a forum for them. Blender, OpenSCAD, whatever.
Some forums for advice on printers and printing. One for filament and one for resin at the minimum.
Thingiverse doesn’t need any subforums. That would only make navigating the site more complex. If people need to ask questions, they can pop over to the main forum, create a new topic (which everyone can see), and ask their questions there.
