User blog:BertH/Migrating Forum Content to Discussions

The Discussions feature has been evolving at a slow but steady pace. So far in 2017 we've added the new Notifications system, implemented the new page header, created Discussions Insights and made many other smaller improvements. Later this month, a Discussions module will also return to the footer area on wiki pages.

Discussions is now available on about 80% of FANDOM communities. For those communities that are ready, we're now able to migrate their Forum threads into Discussions. Some communities have been migrated already, either because they volunteered or because they were inactive or had a very low number of Forum threads.



Is your community interested in volunteering for Forum migration? If so, an admin can use Special:Contact to request this. Be sure to include the name of your community.

We know that some communities will prefer to wait until there is further feature development, such as a replacement for Forum’s "highlight" function and a more versatile editor for Discussions. Those are both projects that we'll be working on, along with others, and we'll be sure to announce updates as things continue to evolve. Information about how migration works is below, and future updates will be added to the Discussions FAQ page.

When migration occurs: When migration occurs, It’s the HTML from the Forum threads that gets reproduced in the Discussions posts. So the posts will look very similar to the original threads, visually. However, this means that some of the content has attributes (bold, italic, links embedded in text, etc.) that are not yet possible to manage in the Discussions editor. So admins should not edit the migrated posts unless it’s absolutely necessary. When changes to the post are saved, the HTML markup will be stripped since the editor cannot process it, and the entire post will then appear as plain text.
 * Forum Boards become Discussions categories and will contain all the same posts
 * If Discussions is already enabled on a community, the Forum content comes over as additional categories, so admins will likely want to merge and consolidate after the migration.
 * Special:Forum becomes redirected to Discussions
 * Board URLs become redirected to the specific URL for the new category
 * Thread URLs are redirected to the new post URL
 * Kudos become upvotes
 * Users who were following the Forum threads will be following the Discussions posts
 * Topics (the names of associated articles) will be retained but will not be visible at this time

Here are some examples of migrated posts:
 * http://americangods.wikia.com/d/p/2721312711639121056 - note the updated styling on quotes, and presence of an image in one reply.
 * http://sonic.wikia.com/d/p/2957429763473448898 - this post includes numerous quotes and some template-generated spoiler formatting
 * http://valkyriecrusade.wikia.com/d/p/3005792177357167595 - note the embedded links in the post

Thanks in advance to those communities that opt to make the switch now!

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