What more is there to say anymore? I was browsing the Microsoft Access Feedback Portal to see if there were any new suggestions worth supporting when I came across two ideas that felt immediately familiar. They were not just similar. They were identical to suggestions I had submitted months, possibly years, earlier.
Naturally, I went searching for my original submissions so I could comment on the newer ones and avoid diluting the vote count. To my amazement, both of my suggestions were gone. Completely vanished. Again!
This matters more than it might first appear. When long standing feedback disappears without warning, it erases institutional memory and undermines the value of community participation. Contributors invest time explaining real world problems, refining ideas through discussion, and rallying support through votes. When those records vanish, the same conversations are forced to restart from scratch, effort is duplicated, all the original support for the idea is lost (most probably not to be regained), and trust in the process is weakened. If users cannot rely on their feedback persisting, it becomes harder to justify contributing at all.
So what is actually happening here? Are older suggestions being purged? Quietly archived? Or intentionally removed? Whatever the reason, a lack of transparency only adds to the frustration and makes it harder for the community to believe that feedback is truly being heard.
What makes this especially ironic is that Microsoft is breaking one of the most fundamental database principles: you don’t delete records, you disable or hide them. In any well-designed database, historical data is preserved because it has value for auditing, traceability, and institutional memory. You mark records inactive, archive them, or flag them as obsolete, but you don’t simply erase them as if they never existed. Yet that is exactly what appears to be happening here. Feedback entries effectively records in a database are being removed entirely (no longer in users’ profiles), destroying history, context, and accountability. For a company built on data platforms and best practices, the contradiction is hard to ignore.
It gets to be disheartening after a while. The Dev Team explicitly directs everyone, including MVPs, to use the Feedback Portal for bugs and suggestions, yet the repeated loss of feedback undermines the credibility of that system. When contributors cannot trust that their input will persist, little alone be heard, confidence in the entire process erodes. From there, the conclusions are hard to avoid.
This whole scenario once again proves that the Feedback Portal is nothing more than !