User blog comment:Jenburton/Coming Soon: Message Wall in Labs/@comment-1788742-20111026204007

I really think that if the staff would just decide to make the feature optional, and we didn't have to worry about that anymore, then we'd be able to move on, and be able to actually improve this feature. In my experience, users usually like a mandatory feature less, and a change of this magnitude from the original MediaWiki needs to be optional permanently, rather than simply in labs for a short time.

If the staff just made the Message Wall optional, then we could leave that debate behind and actually work on leaving feedback on how to improve the feature itself. Because making Message Wall mandatory is bad for so many reasons, one of which is that it creates a short of self-fulfilling prophecy ("The feature is bad, and it's mandatory, let's argue against this, we need to keep talk pages") rather than saying. "This feature looks bad, but it's optional. However, I think it can be improved, though. I'll leave feedback in Labs").

Message Wall, unless it's dramatically changed, will not be better than talk pages. But at least make it 100% optional, staff, so we can actually focus on the real purpose of this- How we can make this feature better. But, of course, until the staff understands that some wikis will never, EVER accept this, we really can't focus on improving this feature.