It seems that the forums for old products (anything older than about 4-5 years) were archived en masse about 11 months ago (based on the date of last post for most of the archived forums…
After a while, maybe due to inactivity or simply age, product forums go away. It's like how there is no forum for the vivoactive, vivoactive-hr, vivoactive3, the original Epix, fr920, fr935, fr23x, fr630, fenix3, fenix3hr, fenix5, fenix5+, and maybe a couple I forgot. And those are just the devices that support CIQ.
Jim is correct. At some point, the product teams must determine whether a product will continue to receive regular maintenance updates. The Venu was released in Q3 2019, which makes it over five years old and is a couple generations behind the current product offerings. This does not mean that Garmin no longer supports Venu or that Garmin would never fix an issue were a critical problem to affect these devices—its just not receiving regular updates so is likely not a primary focus of the product teams.
At some point, the product teams must determine whether a product will continue to receive regular maintenance updates. The Venu was released in Q3 2019, which makes it over five years old and is a couple generations behind the current product offerings
But interestingly, forums for products as old as FR235 (released 2015) were still unarchived and active as recently as 11 months ago. I'm pretty sure FR235 had not received firmware updates for many years before that.
It seems that the forums for old products (anything older than about 4-5 years) were archived en masse about 11 months ago (based on the date of last post for most of the archived forums), which seems to signal a shift in Garmin's strategy as far as older products go.
Other related things I've noticed:
- CIQ store monetization is only supported for newer devices (basically anything with CIQ 4/5 + Fenix 6 pro)
- CIQ 3 devices are no longer covered by new System Levels. CIQ System Levels 4-6 supported both CIQ 3 and CIQ 4 devices (which was the whole point of introducing the system level scheme), but System Levels 7-8 only support CIQ 5 devices (which includes all devices which came out with CIQ 4).
Not saying it's a good or bad thing, just that clearly some thinking has changed at Garmin. Forums for old-ish to very old products were kept around for a very long time, then suddenly all of them were archived. CIQ updates used to support older devices, now they don't.
It's probably easier for devs if they only target CIQ 4/5 devices.
But we're not talking about support forums. These are user forums. So a) it doesn't really cost anything for Garmin to not delete them, b) why not let users help each others? c) removing forums have a bad side effect, users who would normally find the forum for their old device post to all kinds of other forums, pissing many other users.
It seems that the forums for old products (anything older than about 4-5 years) were archived en masse about 11 months ago (based on the date of last post for most of the archived forums), which seems to signal a shift in Garmin's strategy as far as older products go.
I'm not sure about this, but I have no reason to doubt your observations. The product-related forums are operated by other teams (I believe the customer-support-related ones are specifically managed by our product support team). I don't know whether they have a regular plan to remove or archive older product forums or if it's more ad-hoc. I agree with flocsy🤠, though—I don't see a reason to remove forums since customers still own the products and can help each other with use questions, etc. My answer was just an attempt to explain why a product forum may no longer be available.
