How to announce that you are retiring a feature
Removing something is the announcement most likely to be written in the passive voice, because nobody enjoys writing it. The people affected are usually few, loud, and correct that this is an imposition.
It hands the reader a task with a deadline
Everything else here is information. This is homework. Somebody has built a habit, a report, a workflow or an integration on top of the thing being withdrawn, and the post is instructing them to spend time undoing it before a date. Because the request is real work, the writing has obligations the celebratory announcements do not: an exact cut-off, an exact fate for existing data, and an exact escape route. Softening the language does not soften the imposition, it only makes the imposition harder to plan around. The other trap is disproportion. A small number of users are usually deeply invested in exactly the thing being retired, and a post that treats the decision as obvious to everyone reads as contempt to the people it costs the most.
The rule for this one
Lead with the date it stops and what happens to their data. Every other sentence is subordinate to those two facts.
What the category publishes, and what the rule produces.
The first draft is a composite written to match the register the ranking pages for this query actually publish. It quotes no company and no real post. The second obeys the rule above and nothing else, so anything that changes between them is the rule doing it.
The version everyone posts
After careful consideration we have made the difficult decision to sunset our Reports module. We are incredibly grateful to everyone who used it and we are excited to focus our energy on the features that matter most to our community. We will share more details in the coming weeks.
The version that obeys the rule
Reports stops working on 31 January. Your existing reports stay downloadable as CSV until 30 April, and the export button is already there. We are switching it off because 40 of you use it and it is the single largest source of our support load. If you are one of the 40, email us and we will help you move.
There is no date, no fate for existing data and no route out. "More details in the coming weeks" is the sentence that turns a manageable migration into a support queue.
7 of 10 measured dimensions moved.
Both drafts were read by the engine behind our free brand voice generator. It is arithmetic over the text rather than a judgement, which is the reason it is used here: every figure below can be checked by counting the draft printed above it.
| Dimension | Before | After | Moved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sentences | 3 | 4 | Yes |
| Words | 49 | 56 | Yes |
| Average sentence, in words | 16.3 | 14 | Yes |
| Longest sentence, in words | 26 | 21 | Yes |
| Contractions per 100 words | 0 | 0 | No |
| Speaks to the reader | No | No | No |
| First person (we, our, us) | 7 | 4 | Yes |
| Second person (you, your) | 0 | 4 | Yes |
| Vocabulary richness, out of 100 | 78 | 75 | Yes |
| Contains a stock phrase | No | No | No |
Read across all fifteen moments the pattern is sharper than any single page: the hub has the corpus numbers.
What earns the post
- The cut-off date, and a second date for how long exports remain available.
- The honest reason, including the numbers, if the reason is that almost nobody used it.
- A direct offer of help to the people who did, with a way to reach a human.
When not to post it at all
Do not skip it and do not stage it. A quiet removal discovered by a user mid-workflow costs more trust than the feature was ever worth, and it is the single fastest way to make people distrust every other part of the product.