Over the weekend, Microsoft announced that starting on July 1st 2018 they are no longer offering support for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and a wide variety of older applications in the Microsoft Community forums. This does not mean that volunteers will not be able to answer questions, only that Microsoft staff themselves will no longer respond to them.
The
announcement posted to the Microsoft Community forums states:
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As you can see all of the products mentioned are old with mainstream support already ended. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise to see Microsoft assigning their staff to responding to questions for newer products that are still under full support.
At BleepingComputer, we are still offering support for all of these products in
our forums, except maybe Zune. Just kidding, we'll even help with that Z thing