User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/Why Fandom Evolves: A Look Ahead in 2017/@comment-3013425-20170111205741/@comment-20644-20170111233107

There's two big reasons why investing resources in building Discussions was a better option than fixing the existing Forum feature:


 * 1) Behind the scenes, Forum has a lot of issues. It may work well for its limited intended purpose from a user perspective, and that's great, but it's a technically-challenged feature. The way it's built doesn't allow for effective solutions to bring Forum threads into Search. Mobile compatibility is a big issue. There's also a lot of less visible issues, and we're going to address those more soon in a wider conversation about Discussions.
 * 2) We needed a conversation feature that was in line with current audience expectations about what a conversation platform should look like. Forum was designed as something that a very core group of wiki editors might like, but it wasn't really built up to modern standards.

When you consider that we would have to redesign the inner workings of the feature to address the technical challenges and also redesign how the feature looks on the site, it became apparent that the best way forward was to build something new. That led to Discussions, which we will continue working on before it gets to a place where it would completely replace Forum.