User blog comment:Dopp/Communicate Easily with Message Wall/@comment-1280533-20110926195645

I'll just be sitting on the fence on this until I get forcefully pushed off in a month. Everyone who was here will of course remember a very similar conversation series of complaints (including my own) when we thought Article Comments (which are indeed the direct equivalent of this in the article mainspace) were going to be forced on us with the move to Oasis. Then we were actually told that they were optional and that calmed everything down (a bit).

You say "Keep in mind that since this feature will permanently archive user talk pages, we are unable to use Wikia Labs." Is that the only reason this can't be optional? If so, don't make it permanently archive user talk pages, and let us do that ourselves, if we decide to use the feature. When it archives the page, will it match the archiving system that we already use ourselves? If not, it wouldn't be a very consistent set of archives if the last one is put somewhere completely different to all the rest.

We don't use article comments on Fable Wiki, but what happens when you turn them on? Does it move all the existing messages to the comments, or are they lost? Are they archived in any way? What then if you try to turn them off? Do all the comments then get lost, or moved back to a talk page? I think that if this was made optional, like those, and used the same system (whatever it may be), a lot of people would be much happier.

I like the idea in the way that it could aid in keeping conversations together and that it will give a byline, but other than that I don't really like it. Rather than saying what I don't like about it, I will say how I think it could be improved:
 * Make it optional, like Article Comments, since they appear to be almost the same thing, just for a different namespace (see above)
 * Give us the option to have new messages put at the bottom, like they are on talk pages
 * Make a user's signature, and not just their username, appear in the byline, then all of the effort put into them won't have gone to waste
 * Take "Wall" out of its name; "Messages" is fine on its own