Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26339491-20180810233208/@comment-26339491-20180814234338

Sussettey1 wrote: If forums are removed, then that gives me more of a reason to leave. [...] I spend the majority of my time here on forums, and I’m accessing FANDOM via mobile devices all the time. I don’t really see the issue with forums at all, actually. They work pretty well on mobile devices. Except for the occasional error, the function has been pretty smooth for us. But, whatever you say.

That's fair - we know that not every user on FANDOM will love every feature we develop. The forums are incompatible with mobile, but they will look worse on some devices than on others - and if you're familiar with them from desktop, too, then you're already in a much better position to make them work on a tiny screen than most other users would be. They're by far less compatible with different screen sizes and mobile browsers than Discussions is, though.

Plus, the forums can't be searched, and we can't add that functionality to such an outdated, complex feature without considerable effort and cost. Discussions will eventually be searchable.

Popstar792 wrote: I understand, Mira, but really, the new discussions are pointless.

What specifically about them do you find pointless? What do the forums do for this wiki (other than text formatting and styling, which you already brought up and we've addressed to some degree here) that Discussions couldn't? That would be interesting for us to know to better understand why a community would continue to prefer forums.

Also, only one highlighted discussion makes no sense. What if people who aren't admins have something really important to announce that needs to be highlighted all at once? They'd have to fit in everything on the same thread as one highlighted discussion? Think about it. Threads would have to become super long, topics would be really disorganized, advertising is more likely to happen, necroposting could start, and it consumes way too much time.

There is one major advantage of Announcements compared to forum highlights, and that is that this wiki's active users will see this wiki's announcement notifications anywhere on FANDOM, and not just while they're here on this wiki. Because of this, users who are active on multiple communities would be completely flooded with notifications if every wiki could send them multiple. Forum highlights could also only be used by admins, for a similar reason - we want to make sure only stuff that is genuinely important shows up in a user's notifications.

And no, the community's important news would not have to fit all into the same discussion. Just as in the forums, you can start a separate thread for each issue. You could simply make an article page or blog (e.g. called "Current hot discussions") and link to all of them there. That way, one active announcement would serve to point active users to all news that are currently important.

Thus, the mobile features aren't really useful when most people are using desktop mode.

These days, more than 60% of our users come from mobile devices, and that is a whole lot. Some communities have more mobile users than others (it varies from 30% to 90%), depending on what they're about - but also depending on how well their content is usable on mobile devices. If you want to attract those 60% mobile visitors and get them to be active here, Discussions should do a better job than the forums.

Discussions doesn't support Wikitext, which means text formatting, quoting, templates, etc. won't work there. It doesn't have topics yet (though we're still planning on adding that feature there). So if this community relies heavily on templates, topics or styling in the forums, then yes, Discussions will be less useful for you.

We also understand that some users really just edit from desktop, enjoy the MediaWiki platform and that for them, a simpler and more mobile-friendly forum replacement isn't helpful, because they like using code and custom styling. Those kinds of users are a tiny minority on FANDOM, though, as our data analytics have shown, and so we built Discussions for those that were previously left out.

Side note: If we migrated all your forum content to Discussions, all templates, text formatting, etc. would copy over as well. All current forum posts would look the same once they're in Discussions. You just couldn't create new posts with templates and bold, italic, etc. text.