Microsoft pulls agents from Windows 7, 8.1 and other forums
Microsoft announced on Friday that Microsoft Community forum support will be discontinued for several company products including Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.
Microsoft's Answers Community is operated by Microsoft. It has forums for many Microsoft products and Microsoft employees a number of agents, usually third-party contractors, who interact with users who post on the forum.
While the forums are more miss than hit usually when it comes to finding help, they are certainly very popular as lots of users post there on a daily basis.
If you research a Windows or Microsoft product issue using your favorite search engine, you usually get Microsoft Answers results in the top ten listing. The quality of Microsoft Agent support is not always the best, however, as you will get copy and paste responses often at first.
Microsoft won't offer technical support anymore in the following forums starting July 2018:
- Windows 7, 8.1, 8.1 RT
- Microsoft Security Essentials
- Internet Explorer 10
- Office 2010, 2013
- Surface Pro, Surface Pro 2, Surface RT, Surface 2
- Microsoft Band – this topic will be locked.
- Mobile devices forum – Microsoft support will continue in "Other Windows mobile devices" topic
- Zune – this topic will be locked.
The forums will remain available online and community members can still use the forums to post new topics or replies (with the exception of those that are locked in July 2018). Microsoft agents will still moderate the forums to remove spam and other undesirable messages from the forums but they won't interact with users anymore when it comes to providing technical support.
The company notes that "there will be no proactive reviews, monitoring, answering or answer marking of questions".
It is interesting to note that another Microsoft support agent posted a similar announcement in the Windows 8.1 forum highlighting that Microsoft would so for products that "reached end of support".
Please be advised that effective July 2018, the forum topics for products that reached end of support will no longer receive technical support from Microsoft agents.
The products listed on that page are Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 8.1 RT; all three products are still supported (albeit in extended support). Windows 7 exited mainstream support in 2015, Windows 8.1 in January 2018.
It is unclear if Microsoft's wording is off as Microsoft could mean "extended support" instead of just "support". Extended support includes paid support and security updates at no additional cost only, and that is what Microsoft could have meant.
Closing words
Microsoft surely has a plan for 2020 when Windows 7 support ends and it may be the case that the company plans to push users even more towards Windows 10 by ending forum support in July 2018 already.
The forum is a hit and miss for support topics, mostly miss, in my opinion. While it does offer help for some issues, users who post there got canned responses usually that most of the time did not help at all.
Now You: Do you use the Microsoft Answers forum? (via Woody)
Are these articles AI generated?
Now the duplicates are more obvious.
This is below AI generated crap. It is copy of Microsoft Help website article without any relevant supporting text. Anyway you can find this information on many pages.
Yes, but why post the exact same article under a different title twice on the same day (19 march 2023), by two different writers?
1.) Excel Keyboard Shortcuts by Trevor Monteiro.
2.) 70+ Excel Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows by Priyanka Monteiro
Why oh why?
Yeah. Tell me more about “Priyanka Monteiro”. I’m dying to know. Indian-Portuguese bot ?
Probably they will announce that the taskbar will be placed at top, right or left, at your will.
Special event by they is a special crap for us.
If it’s Microsoft, don’t buy it.
Better brands at better prices elsewhere.
All new articles have zero count comments. :S
WTF? So, If I add one photo to 5 albums, will it count 5x on my storage?
It does not make any sense… on google photos, we can add photo to multiple albums, and it does not generate any additional space usage
I have O365 until end of this year, mostly for onedrive and probably will jump into google one
Photo storage must be kept free because customers chose gadgets just for photos and photos only.
What a nonsense. Does it mean that albums are de facto folders with copies of our pictures?
Sounds exactly like the poor coding Microsoft is known for in non-critical areas i.e. non Windows Core/Office Core.
I imagine a manager gave an employee the task to create the album feature with hardly any time so they just copied the folder feature with some cosmetic changes.
And now that they discovered what poor management results in do they go back and do the album feature properly?
Nope, just charge the customer twice.
Sounds like a go-getter that needs to be promoted for increasing sales and managing underlings “efficiently”, said the next layer of middle management.
When will those comments get fixed? Was every editor here replaced by AI and no one even works on this site?
Instead of a software company, Microsoft is now a fraud company.
For me this is proof that Microsoft has a back-door option into all accounts in their cloud.
quote “…… as the MSA key allowed the hacker group access to virtually any cloud account at Microsoft…..”
unquote
so this MSA key which is available to MS officers can give access to all accounts in MS cloud.This is the backdoor that MS has into the cloud accounts. Lucky I never got any relevant files of mine in their (MS) cloud.
>”Now You: what is your theory?”
That someone handed an employee a briefcase full of cash and the employee allowed them access to all their accounts and systems.
Anything that requires 5-10 different coincidences to happen is highly unlikely. Occam’s razor.
Good reason to never login to your precious machine with a Microsoft a/c a.k.a. as the cloud.
The GAFAM are always very careless about our software automatically sending to them telemetry and crash dumps in our backs. It’s a reminder not to send them anything when it’s possible to opt out, and not to opt in, considering what they may contain. And there is irony in this carelessness biting them back, even if in that case they show that they are much more cautious when it’s their own data that is at stake.