Community ManagerCommunity ManagerJust a heads-up for anyone working on their POTYA 2025 submission: there's a mismatch between the character count guidance and the actual behavior of the submission portal.
The guidelines say the 8,000-character limit for the executive summary excludes spaces, but the portal is definitely counting them. That’s cutting down our usable space by around 1,300 characters—which is a lot when you’re trying to tell a compelling story.
Would love to see this clarified or corrected soon so everyone’s working with the same expectations. Has anyone else run into this?
I 100% expected this. It's been 8000-characters TOTAL for years now. My guess is that they'll clarify the guidelines, rather than changing the character limitation in the award portal.
Hi! Microsoft has since updated the nomination tool to no longer count spaces as characters.
