I have previously explored how Microsoft collects user feedback and pointed out the gap between its publicly stated policy and what the company actually does about feedback. This was my prior issue about the topic from April 2025:

The earlier article covered the problem of having different feedback portals for different product lines, which is of course an ongoing challenge still today. Today, I’m focusing on just the main Microsoft Feedback Portal and what I’ve discovered. Because it appears practically no one using the site knows the answer to a fairly critical question that I’ve seen popping up:

I think I have discovered the answer, after letting Claude Code take a look at the site and analyze its public data. But first, let’s look at how Microsoft customers, MVPs and even employees have been burned by their submitted feedback suddenly disappearing.

If you’ve ever submitted a feedback item and then tried to get back to it after a longer time period, you may have failed to find it. Your initial reaction might have been “man, this portal search sucks!” …and you would have been right about that, too. But it’s probably not the correct explanation for most cases.

Those people who are most passionate about Microsoft’s technology and hope to make an impact will be paying more attention to the feedback they’ve submitted. That’s because often they’ve poured a lot of effort into ensuring the idea they post has sufficient details to gain the support of both other users and, ultimately, Microsoft product teams. If such feedback items then go missing, these folks aren’t gonna just shrug it off.

Daniel Pineault, a long-time Microsoft Access MVP, went through 34 of his own suggestions in early 2026. Every one of them was gone. His blog has the most complete documentation of the Microsoft Feedback Portal content purge:

I can totally relate to the sentiment here, even if the delivery is a bit extreme. Just imagine how you would feel after being told to log technical issues on the portal and then discovering they had been removed without notice.

It’s not just community members like MVPs that have gotten bitten by this. David Craig, a 30-year Microsoft veteran who has since then accepted the Voluntary Retirement Package, has been persistently trying to get the attention of the Microsoft Planner product team via the Feedback Portal. He documented the original issue on his blog in 2024.

In this latest feedback item, “Need Full Graph API Support for Premium Plans”, David added a note saying that his earlier post on the Microsoft Graph feedback forum had been deleted. That one had “as many as 300 votes” yet received no response from MS — and now it is gone.

This highlights the broader impact: it’s not just the content from people who have submitted the feedback. Anyone who bothered to log in to the portal and upvote an item or post a comment loses their contribution too — erased without a trace. Not because the idea got implemented, but because it “expired”.

It’s not a bug, it’s by design. Yes, this is actually the intended behavior of the Feedback Portal. I certainly would have never guessed it, and judging by web searches others are in the same boat. So I created a page dedicated to these findings, using data collected and analyzed by Claude, along with its explanatory text: https://ms-feedback.perspectives.plus.

In short: Your Microsoft feedback will automatically be removed from the web portal after a certain period of time. Except in very rare cases. You won’t find a mention about this policy in the docs for “Learn about how to provide feedback to Microsoft”. It is very well hidden. This one feedback item, posted by the feedback team themselves, finally states it plainly. So, Why does some feedback disappear after fifteen months?

This policy is nowhere to be found outside the portal. And since search engines aren’t allowed to index the Feedback Portal, you basically can only find it via an AI agent that has the patience to pull data via the API. That’s one reason why I wanted to make this post, because at least now the world can discover it from the web. Without spending their own LLM tokens on it like I had to.

What does this policy mean in practice for users? The most important lesson is that if you ever collect information on technical features/issues and suggest a solution or a design change, do not post it only on the Feedback Portal. Because it will be deleted in a bit over a year. This means it is not safe to just share the link to a feedback item on social media or your site, because the actual meat of the issue may not be there once the reader finds the link. You need to post it on a forum or a blog or a newsletter that you trust to preserve it.

Sometimes customers try to get their collective voice heard when Microsoft’s product decisions are causing them concrete harm. A timely example is how Microsoft Publisher has been discontinued. If you have not purchased a perpetual version of the software but instead acquired it through a Microsoft 365 subscription, the kill switch has been activated and you can no longer open the app on your PC.

The feedback item “Don’t cancel MS Publisher” is approaching the 15-month cutoff. Its status is “Open” and it’s not in any Collection. Under the stated policy, the item, with its 106 voters and 64 comments, is due to disappear in November.

No wonder people are interested in using AI coding agents with tools like Reverse Engineer Anything to create clones of commercial software to regain control over it. In the case of .pub files, the Document Liberation Project has done the reverse-engineering for you, enabling Publisher file support in LibreOffice.

The removal of old content (if you can really call 15 months “old”) is in itself not the root problem. Yes, it should not be done without being explicit about this in the Feedback Portal UI and documentation. Sure, I bet there can be regulatory reasons providing an excuse for Microsoft to enforce such a policy in the name of “privacy, security, and compliance”. The employees in charge of the feedback collection system may have determined this is the least bad option to do their jobs and remain compliant.

The fundamental problem is that these feedback forums and data collection processes were first built with great fanfare — and then Microsoft as an organization proceeded to ignore them completely. No responses, no processing, no sign of anyone listening. It becomes a void that ends up doing more harm than good to the customer relationship.

I’ve written before about how this silence isn’t necessarily proof that no one on the inside is reading the feedback. Back when I was still in the MVP program, there were PMs showing real data and numbers from the feedback forums (not this specific one, though), telling us how they use it to build up the business case to get funding for feature development. People on both sides in general are trying to do the right thing, yet in a monolithic org the size of Microsoft, it can be pretty tough.

The feedback process is very obviously broken and the data proves it. First, there’s little visible sign of user votes translating into progress: 99.3% of all 572,622 votes sit on ideas still marked "Open".

Second, responses appear to be the exception. It’s mostly customers commenting on each other’s ideas and feedback.

Deletion of data is just the icing on the cake. Under the 15-month rule, the estimated average expiry rate is about 219 ideas a day, roughly 9 an hour. The next-30-day projection is about 5,900 ideas and 36,700 votes, with estimates scaled up for the sampled forums.

I could go on but there’s no point. All the numbers show that the system has been abandoned. I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone who worked on setting up the Feedback Portal has since moved on. The “(Preview)” tag on the home page of that Power Pages site is ironically very accurate. Launched in 2021 to replace UserVoice, this portal has in practice been deprecated and someone just forgot to tell all the customers about it.

You must have seen this phrase many times. At the end of product team blog posts, in the annoying popup dialogs that interrupt your work, everywhere. It’s the boilerplate of corporate communications, but also an active data collection process which integrates with the in-product feedback mechanisms. Including the user feedback entries that your tenant admin can see from MAC:

That’s a different feedback channel from the public Feedback Portal, but it illustrates the same appetite for collecting customer input.

Microsoft wants feedback data. There are many customers who are willing to provide that feedback — at least when they encounter something that’s a source of repeated frustration. Together with the in-product telemetry, these user reactions and open text comments must provide a treasure trove of data to be crunched by all sorts of algorithms to produce insights.

When the tenant setting that allows users to send feedback is turned off, Microsoft has a “did you know” box encouraging admins to enable it:

These statements are all true, of course. Everyone wins when there’s a chance for the users to share their concerns and ideas. In this age of digital mass surveillance, some people might be wary of letting SaaS vendors collect too much telemetry data about them. But this is no Meta or Google we’re talking about. Microsoft is still a software company making money by selling licenses to customers, rather than using their data for targeted advertising (mostly).

Collecting feedback digitally is easy. What’s missing is the part that humans would expect: acknowledgement. Especially when there are dedicated forums established for major products and customers are directed there on every occasion, the decent thing for Microsoft to do would be to occasionally say: “we hear you”.

The last time I wrote about feedback management, the main issue I covered was how the “What responses can I expect?” policy of the Feedback Portal was not being followed by the very organization who had defined it. Today, that problem of no responses nor status changes remains just as bad as it was then. The fact that this silent feedback machine now also deletes ideas posted by users from the forums just adds insult to injury.

You can consider this post as my feedback to Microsoft on how I feel about all of this. No, I won’t post it to the Feedback Portal. I spent my time doing the analysis and the writing. The last thing I would want is for it to be silently deleted after 15 months.

Want to share some feedback of your own? Please vote on this poll: