From The Editor's Desk — new Windows Central community features, we'd like to hear from you!

Hey Windows Central community, it's been a while, hasn't it?

As of 2025, I've been working at Windows Central for ten years, and times have certainly changed. When I first joined the site, formerly known as WPCentral, the company was already transitioning away from a primary Windows Phone focus and towards a broader view of the entire Microsoft ecosystem — across Xbox, Windows itself, as well as phones and eventually Surface. The landscape today certainly looks a lot different.

Microsoft is building its business increasingly towards artificial intelligence and cloud. Xbox has gone global, as well as multi-platform, and is pursuing a Windows-like OEM hardware presence. Windows itself is trucking along as always, but Surface is perhaps no longer the innovation powerhouse it used to be. And we all know what happened to Windows Phone.

Despite all the changes, our core team has remained unchanged for over a decade in some places. Windows Central has always had a small team, albeit with ambitious goals. We remain one of the biggest tech sites among English-speaking nations, thanks entirely to the support of all of you.

We want to do better and do even more. And here's where it begins!

New commenting system!

When Future PLC acquired our parent company, one thing we were quite honestly disappointed to lose was our comments system, since we always had a strong commenting community on the site. Technical limitations at the time meant it would be a fairly lengthy (two-year?) process towards getting the comment systems back, but they weren't exactly the most intuitive implementation.

Although we've had the new system for a while, I just wanted to introduce it formally.

You can sign in with your forum account or create a new account linked to multiple existing credentials. Hit "Sign In" at the top of the banner to make an account, and you'll instantly gain access to our new comments feed. There you can easily see replies from any page, and instantly respond in kind.

The system is new, and we're still implementing new features. The auto-moderator systems are also a bit aggressive, but we're trying to catch comments that genuinely aren't spam to greenlight them, so do bear with us on that front.

The comment system block includes poll options and featured comments, and we hope to expand it to other systems in the future, including custom badges, avatars, and other tools. Stay tuned for that.

We want to hear from you!

Now that we have some of our community systems back, we want to return to things we used to do back in the day. Community discussion posts, as well as contests, giveaways, and other fun things.

To that end, we'd really like to hear feedback from all of you on precisely what you want to see.

Some of the things we've experimented with in recent times include the Discord server, which we found to be simply too much work to maintain within our means properly. We used to do a lot more video, too, of course, back when we had our video producer Mark Guim (we miss you, Mark!!). There are things that we want to do that perhaps simply require staff levels and free time we don't have at the moment. There are certainly things we can't fully control either, but we still want to hear what you would like us to aspire to change and improve, either way.

Whether you have feedback on the editorial direction, content, community features, or whatever else, drop it in the comments here, and we'll collate the feedback for future action.

And finally, a thank you note!

I've been at Windows Central for ten years, but some of us have, of course, been here even longer. The number of amazing people I've met, the things I've learned from all of you, and the stories we've shared together represent some of the best years of my life. We're all still here because we love the site and the community that exists around the potential of this strange and quirky Microsoft ecosystem.

But, as I said, we couldn't have done any of it without all of you. So, thank you for that.

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Let us know what you'd like to see more of, and help us shape the future of Windows Central.