User blog comment:Jenburton/Coming Soon: Message Wall in Labs/@comment-954127-20111025011503/@comment-737801-20111025024743

"Part of the goal of message walls is to replace all talk pages, including article talk pages and forums. User talk pages are simply the first step." This scares me to death and if that is where Wikia is going, then I will leave, I will not go quietly, and I doubt I will be the only one. If Wikia is seriouly planning that, then we NO Wikia is no longer a Wikia hosting site, it's a tenth rate Facebook wanabe/rip-off.

Moncho, I do have to ask this, which side are you on here because it sounds like you are jumping sides here with that last comment. That may just be me reading comments through the impersonality of the internet and if it is, then I apologize, but I'm not sure what I'm seeing here.

Instead of content based wikis, we now have everything that Facebook does. Content? What is this content? We at Wikia don't care about that. All we care about is you treating us as the "new" Facebook. Our latest features, we now have discussion boards instead of articles, walls in instead of talk pages, and many other social networking features that you can fine on Facebook. You don't need Facebook, just come to Wikia for all of your socalizing needs. If the staff is planning that, then the staff has completely, 100% forgotten what a wiki is about. Wikis are about content, not socializing and if we replace all talk pages and the ability to create specific forums, then we lose two of the best tools for maintaining a wiki.

Talk pages are where the behind the scenes work is done and I doubt the staff even realizes this anymore. Given this useless and pathetic excuse for a replacement for user talk pages, if it replaces all talk pages, and this is the direction Wikia is going, then the staff is trying every day to turn Wikia into a social networking site, and not a wiki hosting site. We use user talk pages, talk pages, and specific forums for a reason, to improve the site, and if those tools are taken away, then I call for a vote of no confidence in the staff. They clearly have forgotten the purpose of a wiki and nothing anyone on the staff says will convince me otherwise as I will consider it all a lie.

Staff members, I beg you to remember that a wiki is about CONTENT FIRST, SOCALIZING SECOND. Wikis are supposed to gather, organize, present, and improve CONTENT, not be talking about the latest new socalizing feature. All that will happen is that Wikia will no longer be run on the MediaWiki software, it will run the MediaWikia software. What Moncho siad below is correct, MediaWiki can't handle this and the staff is forcing it not only down our throats, but into a software that doesn't know what to do with it. This feature is a badly done, horrible replacement for talk pages and the staff needs to realize this and keep this optional so that wikis that want to focus on socializing can do so, but wikis that focus ont what the purpose of a wiki is, CONTENT, can use the features that MediaWiki gives, which are the best tools for that purpose, to focus on the content side of their wiki. Making friends and socializing is great, BUT NOT AT THE EXPENSE OF CONTENT. I don't think the staff realizes this as they keep coming up with buggy, glitchy, and useless SOCIAL features and the only fixes for the content based side are glitchy, slow, and annoying to use. It's almost like the staff wants us to use our wikis for pure socalization and not for building the number one source for their topics.