> I actually was thinking along the lines of "interesting coincidence" but now I actually believe it is not a coincidence and they really did do this just to prevent people discussing welding Bing and "AI" into the FUCKING KEYBOARD
Thus iOS support is just at:
https://support.swiftkey.com/hc/en-us/categories/200371942-i...
As a further note, Microsoft support is centralised at support.microsoft.com and it appears that they are currently adding all these help topics there too:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/swiftkey
IMO this falls into "don't attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
As an aside, I suspect these bing-related features are the only reason the product was brought back from the dead. Looks like Microsoft are adding features to allow you to help author text supported by GPT (e.g. change the tone of the message, rewrite portions from the keyboard etc)
SwiftKey, Edge, and several other Microsoft properties are actually under the auspices of Bing Ads now. A while ago, Microsoft made the wild move to shuffle a bunch of branches under the leadership of former Yandex CTO Mikhail Parakhin. Gradually, Mikhail began to make moves that caused a fair number of the original Edge team -- those who had come from IE, brought up Spartan, then brought up Edge-on-Chromium -- to leave in fits of rage over the anticonsumer path the browser team was being forced down. The engineers revolted and left when they couldn't fight anymore.
LinkedIn tells a lot about people moving from Edge to other places and even other companies afterwards. Some of the longest time zealots of the platform have turned their back on the tools they helped make because of it.
Fast forward about a year and we get The Fucking Bing Button. A top Bing search query for several weeks was "Remove the fucking bing button in edge" (or some variant thereof). Top results are all how to get rid of the Bing discover button: https://imgur.com/qZQ1NLn
I would not be surprised if there was backlash against it in the forums that Mikhail did not like. SwiftKey is a much smaller product space that does not have a high revenue, which means that he has every incentive to make it bleed every penny it can.
eg. with Edge it's blatantly clear it's not made asking "how can it be the best tool for the user" but "how can we best use the user to drive Bing+GPT"
Thank fuck for Brave.
My guess is that there's some legal issue involved. Maybe the lawyers were convinced that somebody posting illegal or confidential info on an unmoderated forum is a big risk, and deleting the entire things is cheaper than paying some moderators.
They are just cutting costs. Forums need moderators (I am one of them, lol), and businesses can't rely on volunteers for that. Expect them to open new forums whenever they need to push adoption of some new product, re-hiring mods as part of the budget for that push.
I Have No Keyboard and I Must Scream ?