Hiding Inactive Channels Automatically was a Terrible Idea

One of the oft-repeated tropes about Microsoft is that they need several attempts to get software right. This might certainly be true for the Teams feature designed to help users focus on active work by hiding unused channels. First introduced in Fall 2024 with the aim that: “Teams will automatically detect inactive channels you haven’t interacted with in a while, and automatically hide them for you,” the feature soon ran into problems. Initially, Microsoft said that Teams will automatically detect inactive channels that a user hasn’t interacted with for 45 days. The number was revised upward to 120 days in MC804771 (March 21, 2025). Apart from these statements, Microsoft hasn’t given any further details about the criteria used to determine the level of activity needed to regard a channel as active.

The way that Teams suppressed notifications from hidden channels didn’t help either. Although cleaning up a channel list to highlight active channels might be a good idea, it’s not so good when someone misses an important notification about an event posted in a channel that’s inactive because it’s reserved for discussing critical issues.

Offering Suggestions about Channels to Hide

Microsoft duly reversed course and acknowledged that automatically hiding inactive channels without user oversight was a bad idea. They promised to clean up the mess by announcing in MC804771 that Teams would offer suggestions about inactive channels and leave it to users to decide if the suggestions are valid and should be accepted.

Six months later, MC1141958 (25 August 2025, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 325780) announces that the update to give user control over hiding inactive channels is available in targeted released and will be generally available very soon. You’ll know if the update is available by checking the Settings app to see if the control for hiding inactive channels now mentions “suggestions” (Figure 1).

Opting for Get suggestions now forces Teams to show its current list of inactive channels. When I chose the option, it revealed five channels (Figure 2). The interesting thing is that similarly inactive channels in the same teams are not in the list. This underlines the general lack of information available from Microsoft about how Teams chooses inactive channels.

Automatic Maintenance and Coach Mark Messages

If the setting to hide inactive channels is On, Teams performs a periodic check to find channels that could be hidden. This doesn’t happen when a user has less than or equal to 25 visible channels.

If Teams finds some inactive channels, it notifies the user with a “coach mark message.” I was unfamiliar with this term, but apparently a coach mark is a user interface element intended to educate users about a new feature. Now that I know what these messages are called, I’ll stop referring to them as the annoying pop-up messages that infest Teams (or maybe not, because the overuse of these messages is still annoying especially when there’s no way to turn them off).

In any case, the message will prompt the user with “Looks like you haven’t visited some channels lately. Hide them to help you focus.” If the user opts to be distracted from doing whatever they were busy with before Teams launched its coach mark, they see the same dialog as shown in Figure 2.

There’s no administrative control over the hiding inactive channels feature. Its only control is at user level through the Settings app.

Hurrah for Sanity

The simple fact is that sanity has now been restored to the attempt to unclutter user views by removing inactive channels. Software, even Copilot at its best, has a hard job of understanding why some channels exist and how people use those channels. Given that a single team can support up to 1,000 channels, some inactive channels are likely to be floating around in everyone’s client. Making polite suggestions that some channels can be hidden is a much better approach than automatic clean-up, especially when the criteria used to select inactive channels are so fuzzy.

So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive insights updated monthly into what happens within Microsoft 365, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.