Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-10637-20200820124021/@comment-24155515-20200821141823

Technically WantedPages listings don't list things from Discussions-based areas, but in my experience, I've had to go through that more to remove redlinks than to make new articles based on linkings when it comes to message walls and talk pages (because redlinks there are more than likely things the welcome template linked that were deleted for a reason).

They also probably aren't available on pages that otherwise list all pages on-wiki or all pages of a certain type.

Recent changes and other logs don't appear to be capable of listing discussions-based features' histories or changes (and the Dev Wiki hack I was using for Discussions stopped working after UCP migration).

Being Discussions-based, the Abuse Filter cannot work on them to automagically stop any edits that would trip a filter on a wiki-based page. We had this problem once on Discussions on the wiki I run, to the point it spawned conversation about what to do about it (luckily it hasn't been a major problem because inactivity but). Not every wiki has the Abuse Filter enabled, though.

HumansCanWinElves wrote: You can turn the messages into (squared) images, which the feeds can preview with the link.

One of the downsides of talkpages for such messages is that the user isn't notified. It is hidden at the bottom of the page and they will only see it if they are scrolling all the way down.

Other downsides are no protection against editing each other's messages, and template/wikitext with unclosed tags would break the rest of the page.

True, but these are all things I expect to notice because I've been on MediaWiki wikis since 2007. XP Plus I'm the only one who's likely to use templates on users at this point (and I make sure to preview my edits to prevent breakage) and the wiki I admin is inactive enough that I can manually review every single edit, so that's its own protection.

Also... are you saying I should change the link-heavy welcome template and the changed-for-each-user block template into screen-reader-inaccessible (and not-specifically-clickable links) images???? That's bad form, I think.

Also, unless something changed with UCP (or even just in the past few years, it's been awhile), last time I got a talk page message on-wiki, I had both the MediaWiki-standard "you have new messages" banner and a sticky in-the-corner message that required no scrolling to see.