Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26339491-20180810233208/@comment-26339491-20180815225348

Remember that announcement notifications from every community show up on all of FANDOM, whereas you only see forum highlights while you're on that one specific wiki. That helps to get the word out to more users, whereas forum highlights are only seen by those who actually visit your wiki in the seven days after a thread has been highlighted. If they don't visit in those seven days, they won't see it, and if they visit after those 7 days, they won't see it either.

With Announcements, you don't just see three or four notifications from one wiki, but all the current notifications from all the wiki where you're active, regardless of where you are on FANDOM. To some users who only edit one wiki, this might not matter, but most are active on multiple wikis. For those, it would very quickly get overwhelming when every community can send them as many notifications as they want, but they will appreciate seeing all the news from all their wikis at one glance.

That's why we limited Announcements to only one announcement at a time.

We can't keep features that cost us time and money around just for nostalgia's sake, if there is nothing else about them that is beneficial. There are some good things that the forums can still do and Discussions can't (such as quoting), and for those things, we'll need to evaluate whether they're important enough to add them to Discussions, too.

Overall, though, FANDOM has to make updates to stay relevant and compete with other sites on the web (we've made an entire blog post about this here - it's older, but just as true now), and phasing out the forums is a part of that.