Board Thread:New Features/@comment-26339491-20191016152503/@comment-27345308-20200116013214

Fandyllic wrote: I never suggested Forum would be easy to move and it's a moot point since they are going to kill it before that happens. What I do know is that MediaWiki is very good about backwards compatibility, so Forum would most likely work as it has, but no better. Since Discussions is largely disconnected from MW, the little that does integrate like the contribution count will probably have to be re-added to the MW part that generates the profile page. I'm sure Noreplyz knows what he's talking about as he's surely been working on tools that involved communicating with threads in some way. Fandom's thread engine is a hack into MediaWiki so big that it manifests itself almost every time you have to do something meaningful with threads in a script. MediaWiki's native way of communication are talkpages and every other form of communication produces oddities in the implementation. I'm speaking as somebody who has viewed the code behind Fandom's threads and got screwed over by it when implementing other tools enough times to know that it does not work how MediaWiki developers would expect and support in future releases. I've also submitted a few backports to Fandom's MediaWiki code repository (most of them didn't get accepted) and for the two relatively major backports I've submitted I had to very carefully review what I've changed because in the several years newer MW version where the change was introduced things worked pretty differently. I don't know what you've heard about MediaWiki's backwards compatibility, but Fandom's thread engine is not just going to work on newer MediaWiki versions.

MediaWiki is only calling into Discussions via an external service that is not going to change in the migration to UCP, and Discussions is calling into MediaWiki for things such as article listing (the allpages API has not changed significantly on newer MediaWiki versions, though Discussions might not be using it) or user listing by prefix (which has already been ported over, and it wasn't a complicated change). By extracting their communication platform to an external service they have made themselves the process of maintaining the platform easier.

So not, it is not a moot point. Maybe porting Forums is not as hard as it seems from the constant use of the porting difficulty in excuses for killing them, but they are most certainly much harder to port than Discussions.