User blog comment:BertH/New Forums now available in Labs/@comment-452-20121205213058

The more issues come to light, the more I think that a better solution to "fix" the old forums would have been to just enable Article Comments for the Forum namespace, rather than re-inventing the wheel as an oval. (It works, but it's not a gentle ride.)

Every new wikia feature seems to depart further and further from normal wiki pages, meaning more and more normal features aren't available, and more and more bugs appear when trying to glue things together (Moving pages across namespaces? redirects? importing? grouped recent changes? links in diff logs?)

Since all comments seem to be implemented as pseudo subpages anyway, I don't see why they weren't implemented as actual subpages, and transcluded in-line.

end of url for a comment to this blog post: end of url for a reply to that comment:
 * @comment-Vandraedha-20121204074520
 * @comment-Vandraedha-20121204074520/@comment-452-20121204153244

Appending ?action=edit to those urls does nothing, and neither do the usual range of "action="s. Export works, Import doesn't.

If the features were implemented as normal wiki pages, then all normal actions would be possible, including move: which is not available for any comments.

and moving a misplaced reply would be as easy as renaming: Or, in the case of replies made out-of-thread:
 * this: /comment-Vandraedha-20121204074520/comment-452-20121204153244
 * to: /comment-SapphireOfNeptune-20121204091607/comment-452-20121204153244
 * this: @comment-Kerry_Stapleton-20121205073227
 * to: @comment-Kerry_Stapleton-20121204155753/@comment-Kerry_Stapleton-20121205073227

The one "new" feature that would possibly need to be implemented would be a new "creator and sysop only" permission.
 * It's not necessary, but this is the current permission on editing blog, message wall and new forum messages. (So don't give me the old "not in the wiki spirit" excuse.)

I think I'll implement this in DPL and use it instead of the new forums. (edit: working well so far, having trouble with recursively loading replies to comments - a limitation of DPL, apparently. But since the new forum only allows a single level of comments anyway, it's no big deal!)

edit: I'm also implementing a DPL-based "Related Discussions" module - because I like the idea, but don't like it appearing everywhere automatically.