Announcing a new way to give feedback on Microsoft Learn

Is this really a step forward? I LOVE that I can see a list of issues submitted for a specific page - when I find an issue with the doc, or something confusing, it's quite often someone else already pointed it out, and I can resolve my issue faster. Your github integration was by far my most favorite thing about the Learn website.

For me this looks like yet another system to fully hide all interactions or lack of interactions with feedback items.

Even with public feedback forums getting fixes obvious documentation errors is really hard and long-running tasks

• routing the issue with proper stakeholders takes weeks or months
• issues are closed as soon as documentation author contacts product team and nothing happens with ticket nor documentation
• issues are just closed with "Unfortunately, we have been unable to review this issue in a timely manner. However, we are making overall enhancements to our content. We are closing this issue for now as there has been no activity for a while. "

How this feedback system will resolve those problems with feedback management?

What is the impetus to make this change?

GitHub is a widely used and heavily successful mechanism for commits and issue tracking and submission.

everyone is familiar with it. There are tons of tools integrated with it. A custom system seems like kind of a massive step backwards 

Ah, nuts. GitHub works consistently and intuitively, whereas I find the Microsoft Feedback Portal feature-poor and exasperating; when I go to leave feedback, I usually end up first leaving feedback for some usability issue of the Feedback Portal itself. I'm not convinced that Microsoft knows how to build a feedback system, particularly one that works well for software developers. I don't suppose you might reconsider keeping GitHub issues?

Appendix: Experience of sending feedback for a programmer-focused Microsoft product

Okay, I thought, maybe my poor experience is only with the user-targeted Feedback Portal and Windows Feedback app, whereas Microsoft might build a more developer-targeted feedback system for its API documentation. So I performed a quick test, opening Visual Studio and clicking "Help -> Send Feedback -> Suggest a Feature..."

Here is what I got:

If my Feedback Portal experience hints correctly, then probably I see this behavior because I use privacy browser plugins, or because I use a proxy, or because I am not signed in on the website (though I am in VS), or because Edge is not my default browser. Maybe I could even find a quick solution for this that wouldn't disrupt my workflow. But this sort of interruption is a regular experience when attempting to leave feedback for Microsoft products. (Teams and Outlook haven't interrupted my attempted feedback, but their in-app interfaces lack many features I regularly use in feedback websites, including both GitHub and the Microsoft Feedback Portal.) Whereas, say, JetBrains Rider's feedback button Just Works.

If you do create a new feedback system, could you please at least support Markdown?

The main complaint is the missing !public! history about changes in a documentation. In the past I had often the case that a documentation was changed, and Microsoft Support argued that a statement was never in the documentation. Regarding a transparent documentation, the new documentation is a clear step-back. Or did I miss something and was unable to find the history in the new documentation? 

aChrisDuarte, I do not think that you understand my concerns.

> Your description of the varying feedback systems you've encountered across Microsoft highlights one of the challenges we're trying to address with this change -- providing a consistent way for people to give feedback.

I do not particularly care whether my feedback experience is consistent; I want it to work well. Right now, the feedback system on GitHub works, and the feedback system off GitHub largely does not work. Moving the GitHub feedback system to a feedback system implemented to the same standards as Feedback Portal would be a massive downgrade.

> this new system supports languages other than English.

Pardon. Does GitHub not support languages other than English? What am I not understanding?

> the feedback form will continue to evolve and incorporate features in the coming months, so thank you for sharing your idea to incorporate markdown support.

So it won't support Markdown at first and maybe not ever.

> [screenshot]

Wait. Does that mean that feedback on Microsoft Learn will (mostly) move away from the discussion format altogether?

I had not realized the implications of "a simplified thumbs up / thumbs down form". That UI does not look as though it would support Markdown, images, linking to other issues, discussion, or probably even responses from Microsoft. ಠ_ಠ It rather looks as though Microsoft is expending effort in order to remove functionality and make my user experience worse.

Could you perhaps tell us more about the feature set of the proposed new feedback system?

> your submissions will remain anonymous

Why is this useful? I like community discussion (in case of workarounds or workflow corrections), which anonymity would seemingly make rather difficult.

Besides, can't anyone who wishes create an anonymous GitHub account already?

> most open-source products will continue to have open-source content repositories.

This sounds as though this change will involve removing the open-source content repository of at least one open-source product. Is this the case?

> It’s important to note that even the open-source repositories will have the option of using the new form for submitting your responses, if you prefer to use it over GitHub Issues or a Pull Request.

So if you have to support the dual tracks of GitHub issues and the new feedback form anyway, why turn off GitHub issues for most repositories?

I do not understand the advantage of this change. Isn't forum-style feedback much more fully detailed and helpful than form-submitted feedback?

Personally, I am not dead set on using GitHub (even though it's a very convenient and easy system). However, please keep the feedback publicly visible, so that we can check other peoples comments if  we are struggling. If there is an issue with the documentation, most likely someone else already encountered it and mentioned it. In the past, this has shorten troubleshooting time significantly in some instances and you can subscribe to that GitHub issue to get informed when the issue has been fixed.

Huge disappointment. With GitHub we could always see if there is any issue with existing documentation as we can browser existing issues reported by previous user.

Feedback must be public - this allows community to step in and send documentation corrections and improvements when we see that somebody reported an issue and Microsoft does not resolve it immediately. That's what I do: in a repo I look for problems that I understand how to fix and send you pull requests for those issues. Without access to feedback items, I won't be able to improve Microsoft documentation in those parts that I personally don't use everyday.

For the first time, MS had a good feedback system, called GitHub issues. I won't rephrase all the benefits that others here mentioned here. The only drawback of GH issues, is that issues were not cleaned in a timely manner by the MS employees, and accumulated over the years.  It was the same problem with the old "UserVoice" system, which MS used few years back for various products such as Intune. Bugs and product enhancement were not cleaned or officially discarded, and over the years, the intention of the requestor was barely understandable (the voting system was a disaster to be honest...), or there were tons of duplicates and the poor guy hired to triage these feedbacks had no real deep product expertise.

The advantage of a public feedback system, available on a web page and with markdown!, is that you can get traction from other MS customers, or you can share temp hints to workaround a specific issue. It is sometimes also useful when you hit cases opened thru MS support tickets, where the only reply you get from PG is that it is "closing ticket because by-design" (understand "broken by-design" or "suboptimal by-design", "unusable-in-reality-by-design" but as it is by-design, your feedback lands in the bin). One thing is sure : if there is a wrong or outdated info on the MS Learn articles, and if I need to spend more than 10 min to write my feedback and prepare proper screenshots, there are 0 chances I do this if my feedback is not public (typically, I wrote this one only because it is public).

Something tells me that every 3 years, someone at MS decides to choose yet another feedback system, because it is faster to spawn a new one and put the old one in the "early retirement program" , rather than addressing the real problems. This disease certainly exists in my company as well, so looks nothing new to me.