Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26339491-20180810233208/@comment-26339491-20180815200137

Popstar792 wrote: Ugh. I didn't exactly mean that it helping others was irrelevent, I just meant that we could just leave the old wikis with forums because I didn't agree with putting the new discussions on them! We can't keep the forums up and running, because they are an inflexible and increasingly outdated dinosaur of a feature that is very difficult for our engineers to maintain. Picture a damm that constantly leaks - you can keep patching it up to keep the water in, but at some point, it'll blow. That's why we build Discussions, a feature where it is much easier for us to add more features and to repair any bugs that occur.

Most of this isn't visible to users, and we're well aware that many users continue to use and enjoy the forums - they're just not sustainable for us. At some point, our engineers will spend so much time fixing oddities in the forums (e.g. messed-up forum notifications) that they have no time left for improvements to the rest of the site.

I was just saying thay if somebody were to go on desktop mode on a mobile device, forums would be just fine!

Can you use the forums on a mobile device? Sure!

The problem is that they look like this for most mobile users. That doesn't mean they're unusable, but the vast majority of people who just use their phones these days are used to a much better experience where they don't have to move the screen around or look at tiny text to see everything. When they see forums like this, they'll laugh and think twice before visiting FANDOM again.

We can see that pretty clearly in our data, too - that shows that virtually no one uses the forums on mobile (you guys appear to be the exception), compared to a huge percentage of mobile users who are active in Discussions.

and I just simply disagreed with some of the things that the new discussions would do for old wikis because then only one doscussion would have to be highlighted and everything would have had to fit in! I just felt it would be time consuming! You literally misunderstood what I was saying!

Maybe I really didn't understand what you meant there. What are you referring to when you say that everything would have to fit into one discussion?

You do not need to switch to Discussions right now. Eventually, though, that switch will happen for all wikis. By then, Discussions may have additional features that we're thinking about adding, based on feedback by many of our communities, and hopefully there will be some more things that Discussions do better than forums, such as a search feature for posts - but they'll never be exactly like the forums.