User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/Introducing Unification, FANDOM's next big initiative/@comment-3338841-20181003011024/@comment-4568327-20181005165208

Chat had a lot of great potential, but Wikia/FANDOM just never developed it to its full potential. It was always too buggy or too simplistic, too featureless and difficult to monitor and moderate. You needed things like ChatHacks just to be able to manually mark yourself as away and get pinged when people mentioned your name.

When communities began adopting Discord and the use of DiscordIntegrator made it much more evident, wikis that had set up Discord servers found them to be very successful and popular. I'm an admin on The Sims Wiki and we always had trouble trying to get people to engage in things like the forums, community activities, and even Wikia Chat. When we rolled out our Discord server to the public almost a year ago it experienced a significant surge in popularity and has to date been the most successful community initiative we've ever attempted. Funny enough, nothing that FANDOM ever did helped us reach such success.

Discord has way more features and is far better developed than Wikia Chat, even though the latter has been around for much much longer. Chat wasn't a priority for FANDOM at all and they simply let it fall through. I'm much happier with Discord than Chat; easier to moderate, lots more features, and the ability to view messages sent while I was offline makes it a very logical choice to simply disable Chat and move to Discord.

Like I said, I believe Chat had potential, but it was like a muscle that was never exercised.