User blog comment:BertH/Migrating Forum Content to Discussions/@comment-24302820-20170815063640/@comment-24302820-20170818235521

Thank you for your reply, and for cross-posting. Notifications did not alert me that you had replied here, so your cross-post is greatly appreciated.

You're right, it is confusing (as is the setup on this page making it seem like I'm talking to myself since I have to hit 'reply' on my own post, instead of there being a button on yours) and the official articles explaining Discussions didn't really clarify that for me. So, even with Comments disabled, Discussions would automatically still be at the bottom of the page, but now they aren't even relevant to said page? That's even worse, in a lot of ways. It fights against the look-and-feel control over individual wikis (which, bizarrely, seems to be a huge new trend on Wikia, and a whole other issue) is even more distracting than Comments, and is just wasted bandwidth.

I honestly can't see the point of ditching forums for Discussions. The latter aren't as simple or intuitive to use as a forum. There's additional page-load time and effort--for both the user and their web-browser--that could and should be avoided. The whole thing looks like it was designed for just one thing: looking like a social media app for a phone. This is not a good thing, especially for a web page. It's a user-interface issue: rather than being conducive to reading posts or finding sought information, Discussions are designed to be easily and casually flipped past with a flick of your wrist hoping something leaps out at you. This is the exact opposite of what it should be doing.

I don't want my Wikia website to be a social media phone app. I want it to be a website. I don't browse Wikia sites for casual commentary; I come for quality content. My own Wikia site needs that quality content, and frankly, things fall apart without it. In short, Discussions don't offer anything new that forums did, and did better. Sites aren't even given the option to use Discussions, talk pages, or forums as they prefer. Not all Wikia sites are created equally. That's one of Wikia's greatest strengths, in fact. I fully get that it's extra overhead to try and maintain multiple components, but this seems like a change that was done just to be changing something, which is even greater headache for those poor souls at Wikia trying to make this work on the back-end, all for something that even a casual browsing would seem to indicate that most users do not want.

I see Discussions as one more in a line of new whiz-bang ideas that will ultimately be dropped in short order (Maps, anyone?) except that this time it can do serious harm to all of our communities. It's being able to properly discuss things among active users and admin/moderators that drives content, and content is what brings everyone to the table. It's not that Discussions can't do that, it just doesn't do so nearly as well, and that can only hinder things for all our sites.