Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26339491-20180810233208/@comment-26339491-20180814004233

Cp21075 wrote: It looks like they will copy the forum stuff over for us

Yes, we'd copy everything over, so not a single post is lost and all links to forum posts redirect, too.

The reason why we can't have both forums and Discussions is explained here under "Why does Forum have to be removed?". In short, the forums are a very outdated, buggy feature that is really hard for our engineers to maintain, and it doesn't work for mobile users, which make up more than half of all users on FANDOM. That's why we're replacing them with a mobile-friendly feature that is fits better with the way people use the internet these days.

'''This means all FANDOM wikis with forums will eventually have to switch over to Discussions, but you can choose whether you want to make that switch now or wait until it becomes mandatory. '''

If the limit of only 1 announcement at a time is a problem for your community, I suggest making a blog or article page where you list everything that is currently important. Then you can create a new announcement every time that page gets updated, and anyone clicking on that announcement will still get all the news you want them to see.

The reason we only allow 1 announcement at a time is that we've found that users tend to completely ignore all notifications if there are too many of them. That means, if there is only one notification about something important on the wiki, it's more likely people will pay attention to it than if there are five.

Popstar792 wrote: My friend said that FANDOM actually used to be called wiki cities. Then fandom came along, and stole Wikipedia's version and made it better. She said that FANDOM's been getting worse and worse over the years. I agree. Everything is being made for mobile.

Yes, FANDOM was started by Jimmy Wales, who also started Wikipedia. It was called Wikicities at first, later changed its name to Wikia, and then changed its name again to FANDOM. We are indeed making a lot of changes to make our platform more mobile-friendly, because fewer and fewer people use computers to access the web anymore - if we don't evolve to reflect that change, we'll go out of business.

Sesamegirl517 wrote: I wonder if they mean by phasing out forums, that Live Chat would be phased out too. If they do phase it out, we should make a Discord. I could create if everyone agrees on it.

The chat is completely separate from the forums, so it's not affected by this switch to Discussions. A wiki can enable Discussions and keep its chat just as it was.

Do you have more questions about what switching to Discussions would look like? I'm happy to answer them as best I can!