Dynamics 365 Community Platform Update – Sep 16th

Welcome to the next edition of the Community Platform Update. This is a weekly status update of the latest capabilities and improvements our team is making to the community platforms. Each edition will provide a summary of the progress we’ve made over the past week, and what you can expect this week.

September 9 – September 13th Summary

Over the past two weeks, we’ve made significant progress across all key areas, particularly in spam prevention. Spam has dropped from a peak of 540k posts per week to just 1.7k this week - a 99.7% reduction - bringing daily spam counts into double digits and putting spam fully under control. Additionally, performance optimizations and user experience improvements are progressing well and remain on track for our Milestone 2 timeline, which is the end of September.

Spam

Spam is now fully under control, with a significant reduction from a one-week peak of 540k spam posts to just 1.7k this week - representing a 99.7% decrease from its peak. With the new controls we’ve placed last week, the number of spam posts has dropped from 9500 to 770 spam posts in a similar 4-day period.

The decrease in spam has been met with increased community engagement. Community activity is up by 15.8%, and the feedback we’ve received from you has confirmed that spam is no longer visible in the community.

The scale of this success is best illustrated by this chart:

As with last week, we are still not done with implementing countermeasures. We are fully aware that spammers are a resilient lot and will constantly probe to find vulnerabilities. We have additional new controls that we are preparing to roll out in the coming weeks. Our goal is zero spam, and we will keep implementing and refining our controls and tools until we’ve achieved it.

Performance

Performance remains stable, and we are continuing to evaluate some improvements in our test environment that show promising results. When we have completed our testing and feel confident in implementing it, we will deploy these into production.

Two of the areas that remain under testing are:

• Redesigning thread landing page: Redesigning the thread landing page as well as the underlying query. We believe this will improve navigability for users and significantly decrease load times.
• Modern Thread List Control: We have started some testing on a new type of control on the forum thread based on the PowerApps Control Framework (PCF). Preliminary testing suggests a 3x improvement in speed, which is extremely encouraging. We will have more to say about this in the next edition when we’ve made more progress with our proof of concept.

User Experience

Progress Made Last Week:

• Persistent banner notifications: These changes were deployed last week and are live in the community.
• Landing page unification: The Unified Community landing page was deployed to production and will be enabled on 09/16 for the Power Platform Conference. When live, this landing page will give users who frequently use both the Power Platform and Dynamics communities an optional portal through which to navigate to either site. It will also serve as a landing page for new members to sign up for both communities.
• Subscriptions/Notifications: The logic for forum subscription notifications has been updated to ensure only approved posts generate notifications. Users who comment on a post are now automatically subscribed to the thread unless they unsubscribe.

Plan for This Week:

• Subscriptions/Notifications: Enable improved thread and forum notifications (ETA: 09/16).
• Prioritized backlog for Milestone 3: Review and share top-priority community enhancements for Milestone 3, both internally and externally (ETA: 09/20).

We encourage you to continue to make use of the feedback tool on the community to submit new ideas for enhancements and change requests. We continuously evaluate and triage your suggestions for placement on your roadmap, so please keep ‘em coming! This tool is the best way to ensure that your voice is heard.

If you’re a Community Ambassador, we also encourage you to attend our monthly Ambassador calls where you will have an opportunity to provide feedback directly to the platform team and discuss our plans with us. And if you’re coming to the Power Platform Conference in Las Vegas, please stop by the Community Lounge and meet with us. We will be there to say hello and listen to your thoughts and feedback.

Until next week,

Charles Drayton and the Community Engagement Team