User blog comment:BertH/New Forums now available in Labs/@comment-188432-20121202033808/@comment-452-20121204154225

Until now, I had no idea that anyone could remove anyone's message wall posts. The only time I had ever seen it happen was thread authors removing sub-comments, so I assumed that that power was limited to them.

If my main concern was "vandals will delete everything!" then I'd be placated.

As I said on the second page, my main concern is I want normal wiki functions available for all features : I still can't move Message Walls threads from one wall to another, nor move a post in a thread to a different thread. (I can also not move a forum post into another thread, in order to merge threads about the same question. "Link and Lock" is sloppy moderating which creates needless noise.)

Being able to perform maintenance tasks like that was something I could do that with old forums and talk pages, and are therefore in the wiki spirit. I can't even move something from another namespace into the board_thread namespace. So if a user mistakenly creates a main namespace thread asking a question, I cannot move it to the forum - as I could with the old forum, so I would be better off creating my own user_blog based forum alternative. (Which I was thinking about doing around the time of the forum announcement and I've been putting it off because I assumed the new forums would meet the same needs)

Importing and exporting are also things I could do and are also therefore in the wiki spirit. (Admittedly, I've tried importing/exporting user_blogs, but since I can move things to/from the user_blog namespace, I assume it's possible.)