Board Thread:Wiki management/@comment-26339491-20161115005058/@comment-26339491-20161115184519

To clarify a few important points:


 * We'll enable Discussions here in two weeks, but the forums will stay for the time being, so you can choose whether to give Discussions a shot or not. Down the road, forums on all wikis will be closed and merged into Discussions. This is not happening for a while yet, though.
 * Discussions is not done yet. On the contrary, we're still furiously working on building it. There are many things like e.g. highlighting a post, notifications, following a conversation, formatting text, uploading images, etc. that the forums have, but Discussions doesn't yet. By the time we're done, Discussions will have all that, and more. So chances are, even if you don't like Discussions now, you'll like it better once it's finished.

Moon Snail wrote: I like the report feature, but I have a question: Does the report go to the official Wikia staff, or to the staff of the wiki in question? Or both? Admins and discussions moderators can filter all posts to see only those that have been reported. Here's how exactly that works: Reporting Content and Viewing reported content

TheO0032 wrote: (...) It is very troubling to use, you cannot directly access most of the things you can access in forums. You cannot view other posts, or do any research. I'd prefer to keep the forums.

Can you explain what it is that you can access in the forums, but not in Discussions? Specifically, what do you mean by "you cannot view other posts"? We'd love to find out what you're referring to, because it's valuable feedback while we're still working on Discussions.

TheO0032 wrote: I noticed that you cannot edit your posts after 24 hours. That should be changed.

The reason for that is that as of yet, you can't see if a post has been edited, when, and by whom. By preventing users from editing their posts past 24 hours, we reduce the risk of someone posting something offensive, and then later editing that to escape punishment, or to cause confusion in a discussion. Once there is a way to see who edited a post and how, that editing limit may change.

MR Z BRAINZ wrote: I tried it on another wiki. It doesn't send me notifications!

You can subscribe to email notifications from Discussions in your email settings. On-site notifications like the current forums use are in the works. Once we're done building them, you'll receive notifications on the top right of the page for Discussions just like you do for forums.

HDF0UnofficialAccount wrote: Is there any difference between Discussions and Forums other than not being able to highlight and not receiving notifications?

Those two things will come to Discussions, too. And yes, there are differences. Most notably:
 * Discussions can be used just as easily on mobile as on desktop. The forums work very poorly on most mobile devices, so they effectively keep lots of mobile users from contributing.
 * You can report bad posts in Discussions. In the forums, you have to wait for a mod or admin to see and deal with a bad post.
 * The forums can't be searched. If you're looking for a specific older post, you're out of luck. Once Discussions is completed, you'll be able to search for specific posts, on the wiki, and even via Google.
 * This isn't working just yet, but we're building a highlighting feature for Discussions where you can pick specific user groups to notify. So you could make an announcement for everyone, or just for admins, or for mods and admins, and so on. The forums only let you notify everyone at once or no one at all.
 * You can embed a Discussions thread on a wiki article page, similar to how you can embed a Twitter feed or YouTube video. You can't do that with a forum thread.
 * Other differences that are based on features the forums have but that Discussions doesn't have I won't list here, because Discussions will have those features in the end, too. (For example, you'll have notifications, following, text formatting, etc.)

Light Bomber wrote: So i'll just say the most notable thing about discussions. They lag MORE than the Lawn without ?usesitecss=0 Dihaha wrote: There are some problem about Discussions.It was lag in laptop/PC. (...)

Discussions shouldn't load any slower than other pages on the wiki. If you're experiencing clearly longer load times, could you send a bug report with a link to the Discussions page you're trying to load via Special:Contact/bug? That'll help us check if there are any loading issues we need to work on. Have any of you others tried to browse some Discussions pages and noticed it being slow, too?

TheHandsomePlant wrote: I forgot to ask, will all old posts from Forum move over to Discussions too? Yes, all forum posts will be moved to Discussions when the merge finally comes. No content will be lost.

TheO0032 wrote: How about: we get to vote on wether it gets replaced. (...)

There are several reasons why we won't keep both forums and Discussions around indefinitely. Those are the same reasons why we chose to build a new conversation feature from scratch instead of adding new features to the forums.
 * The forums have a couple of very severe shortcomings. They're not searchable at all. And they don't work on mobile, and since half of all Fandom users visit from mobile devices, we want to have a talking space that works for them, too.
 * You can't see this as a user, but from an engineer's perspective, the forums are a nightmare to maintain. When they were built, the engineers at the time didn't really plan ahead for future demands. It's really hard to fix bugs in the forums (they have quite a few), and even harder to try and make changes and improvements to the forums. So once Discussions is built and has become the only conversation feature, we hope our engineers will have to spend less time fixing bugs, so they can spend more time on developing new features and implementing user requests.