Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-38340188-20190220005700/@comment-26339491-20190307183832

I've actually been following this thread, so there is no need to send us an extra message with the feedback posted here - it's already noted, and in line with much of the previous feedback we've received from the community regarding Discussions.

Fandyllic's points are all correct. Some of them we probably won't be able to fix (such as compatibility with personal CSS or JS), but for others, we still hope to find a solution.

Discussions will always be for logged-in users only. That's not a shortcoming in our eyes, but was a deliberate decision, because our data suggested that, unlike with wiki edits, we wouldn't be losing many valuable contributions if we prevented logged-out users from posting. On the contrary, we're keeping out some of the trolls this way.

Text formatting is still planned for Discussions, though it probably won't come in the form of wikitext support. Discussions posts should be searchable in the long-term, though it's been harder and more time-consuming to figure that out than we originally thought, and that's why there is still no search for Discussions.

Highlighting or sticky post is something we've deliberately decided not to include in Discussions, because our data suggested that users tend to ignore sticky posts. Instead, we've built Announcements which doesn't replace highlights one to one, but does have other advantages when it comes to notifying users about important stuff.

Theming (though possibly not via custom CSS) and layout improvements are also part of our long-term plans for Discussions.

All in all, it's become clear that Discussions won't ever be an exact replica of the Forums. That's an unrealistic expectation given that the Forums were built in a time when the internet was still quite different, and that you're always going to do things a bit differently if you rebuild something from scratch.

However, if we're successful in completing it the way we'd hoped, and can still add the features it's clearly still missing, it'll be a pretty great feature and a very useful tool for the majority of communities, even if it won't satisfy the die-hard Forum fans.