Updates to community platform

Hi all,

Thank you for sharing your experience. I have been on vacation for a couple of weeks and when I came back my focus had to be on other matters than replying to posts, my apologies for that.

The guess here is correct, when you first join the community your posts have to be 'pre-moderated' before you can post. This was a new feature after the move to our new Aurora UI. This change was made in response to the spike in spam posting we saw in the later part of last year and early this year. Indeed when we switched it back in February it took 7 days before the spammers discovered they could post again. 

We usually try to get all content that needs reviewed within 1 business day however, due partly to staff absence last week, we fell far short of this and for this I apologize. 

Do keep in mind its business days - so usually no posts will be approved over the weekend or holidays. 

I would also ask you to keep in mind, although support does happen here, the Microsoft Tech Community is not an official support forum at Microsoft - as such we have no 'support agents' that reply to your questions. Answers are derived from our MVPs, Employees, super users and other engaged customers. If you need support then please do contact Microsoft Support via https://support.microsoft.com or one of the official support channels available to your organization.

If you encounter a delay in future then please do post and mention me and I will take a look, even if I am on a cruise ship!

All the best

Allen

Interesting that link in email notification leads to comment, but when you press on web notification, it leads to the article itself, not to the comment that notification is about.

Yeah, I see the system just ate my comment. "This comment will be published as soon as it is approved" So it appears after posting it, then disappears until approved. And how am I supposed to edit it meanwhile? I have been wondering the same about my posts. But unlike a comment, I can navigated back to a post so I can edit it, because it has its own URL. But none of these unapproved posts or comments are listed on my profile! So I can't keep tabs on them, unless I leave them open in a browser tab, or go back to them (in case of posts) using browser history. This is retarded by design. It also signals to me "guilty until proven innocent" and I don't want to stick around in a "space" like that. See you out there, on the free, open and decentralised web!

So I noticed, and reported. I spent less than a day here and I regret signing up. It was honestly hopeful that it would work better than Microsoft's many previous attempts to create a sort of forum or "community" platform. It looked like a fresh take on what used to be MSDN forums, more geared toward IT people, unlike the Answers site (which they are now terminating by the way). I see you have been on this site for a long time. Can I ask you, do all the posts and comments need to be manually approved before they appear on the site? Like this comment for example. I just posted another comment, on another post, in this "Tech Community Discussion" space, and it appeared under the post. But now, five minutes later, it's gone. I'm not retyping that! But I don't think the comment was lost. Because my post count went up to 7 on my profile. So it probably needs to be approved. I think it's like that. It appears, then they withdraw it for approval, and if they do, then it will reappear. I'm not sticking around to find out. How do you even contact a moderator around here? All Microsoft employees are probably on vacation anyway.