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Back in 2017 and the earlier quarters of 2018, the team published monthly updates as to which features were discussed, denied or implemented. This was done at 2018 monthly product team updates and What features did the Community Team discuss, have implemented, or have denied last month?.

However, this initiative appears to have ground to a halt in September 2018. In fact, the last product update was only posted in November 2018, in response to this post.

Since then, there have been no further updates. A later question asked whether the team would publish monthly updates in 2019; the official response said updates would resume "by the end of February", but nothing changed.

Are the monthly product updates discontinued? Are they being changed to annual or bi-annual updates as suggested here? What will happen to the monthly product updates now?

If you are stopping the product updates, please inform us.

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Super-short, totally cheat-sheet ready answer:

Yes! There will be product updates and they'll resume as early as 2019-06-21!

For a long time, our company blog has been ... well, kinda corporate-y. That's not bad for a corporate blog, but along the way we went from being probably way too informal on our blog to a little too formal. A lot of the old blog posts are great, but they talk about stuff that only folks that are active on our sites really understand. To an outsider, it was hard to see why so much of that stuff was novel, given that so much of it reads just like common sense years later. But we were the ones that made it common sense. We lost something when we stopped talking about that.

Tim, why are you getting all nostalgic about the blog?

Well, my calendar has been down most of the day but I have other reasons too. We have been working with folks across the organization, joining in on the push to bring that community and product updates back to the blog now that we have quite a few more contributors and some better flexibility in the platform.

Updates on the blog :: Q&A on Meta.

Meta doesn't work very well for "grand announcement" type posts because feedback to them gets captured as answers and it's sometimes like being inside a loudly ringing bell. Smaller incremental updates don't work so well on meta because it's easy to miss stuff (producing and consuming) and there's no real concept of shared drafts where folks from many teams can converge.

The platform was never really all that great at open discussion type stuff, that's ... a big reason why we so strongly discourage it on our main sites.

As updates are posted to the blog, feel free to ask a question on this or any other meta site about something on the blog, and we'll do our best to respond.

So meta will be for .. blog comments?

No. While we're looking at different comment systems for the blog, meta will be a place to have a sidebar chat about a specific thing related to something in the blog, which needs more than a blog comment system to be facilitated adequately. We'd rather have you just ask questions where things aren't clear rather than try to anticipate a bunch of questions and just end up realizing we now have a post with a bunch of questions we never anticipated as answers.

As for the specific content (e.g. presence on bugs, what's currently being worked on, what's getting approved but delayed, declined, etc) we're looking at more directly interfacing our back-end bug tracker with meta so you can see (essentially) what we do when it comes to bugs and features. I don't have 100% details on that now, but maintaining the lists of lists of lists of stuff isn't scaling well (obviously), so the ideal way is just let anyone who cares about a bug or feature see the status by where it is on our back end system, by somehow showing that on meta. That's all up in the air at this point.

So no, they're not stopping - they're just changing, and (ideally) becoming less dependent on humans updating stuff like meta posts manually to get them to you, while also letting our product teams collaborate better on shared drafts for announcements.

I'll update this answer as I have more specifics (the irony of that isn't lost on me).

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    I'm sorry, but after your previous answer, I'm having a hard time trusting this response. Also, I don't see how this is relevant to the series of monthly "updates" published in the first two questions linked in the question.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Jun 18, 2019 at 18:24
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    Are we going back to having feature announcements on the blog then? Would the recent badge changes with the life-foo badges be an example of what to expect?
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Commented Jun 18, 2019 at 18:31
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    @JourneymanGeek Similar. Some things explain themselves well without as much context as what went into that one so, smaller, of course - but some maybe more in-depth.
    – user50049
    Commented Jun 18, 2019 at 18:32
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    @TimPost: What about the smaller changes? One of the nice things about the monthly changelist was that smaller changes would be shown in the list alongside big ones.
    – Nicol Bolas
    Commented Jun 18, 2019 at 18:53
  • @NicolBolas I'll talk to Sara and a few of the other PMs but, I believe since we can keep those lists in shared drafts and update them contemporaneously, it actually gets easier to post more regularly without omitting anything.
    – user50049
    Commented Jun 18, 2019 at 18:55
  • This answer raises more questions to me. Are you suggesting that product updates will be moved to blog? Feature announcements in blogs are not regular and are only done for major changes. The update you said will resume on 21st will it be in meta or blog?
    – user271215
    Commented Jun 19, 2019 at 6:04
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    @KolappanNathan Yes, product updates will be moved to the blog. The next update could be as soon as the 21st and will be on the blog.
    – user50049
    Commented Jun 19, 2019 at 12:57
  • @TimPost Thank you. Will the product announcements be done in a scheduled manner?
    – user271215
    Commented Jun 19, 2019 at 16:06
  • @KolappanNathan I can pretty confidently say there will be a schedule. I can't commit to what it's going to look like yet, however. Also I don't envision us posting an update if there's only a few small things, so that might either go out via Twitter or something, or just roll into the next month. But these are details we can work out and outline in some of the next coming posts there.
    – user50049
    Commented Jun 19, 2019 at 16:14
  • @TimPost The most important thing I liked about Monthly updates was that it was a centralized place to know about changes in SE network big or small. Even if it was turned into a blog I was expecting something like "These Weeks in Firefox". These things make me feel part of a community. From your comment, it seems that the new blog posts will be similar to the usual product updates where not all changes are disclosed to the community. It's sad that a community site like SE decides to take this route. Thanks for the info.
    – user271215
    Commented Jun 19, 2019 at 16:34
  • @TimPost Just for clarification, did you mean a blog post like this - stackoverflow.blog/2019/06/18/… or something else?
    – user271215
    Commented Jun 20, 2019 at 5:09

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