User blog comment:BertH/New Forums now available in Labs/@comment-188432-20121203221259

Clearly I love this new feature, or I wouldn't be spending so much time trying to make it better by furious bug reporting.

But I have to admit that, not knowing it was a TOU violation, I instinctively did the ol'  on the RelatedForumDisucssion selector.

Here's what I don't get about it:


 * Why are you giving people a second button on the same page to create an entirely separate discussion about that page?

The discussion about, say, the Doctor should be on talk:the Doctor. Why? because the only kinds of discussions we allow by local policy are about the editing of the page. You want that discussion to therefore be as close to the page as possible. This philosophy has stood Wikipedia in good stead for over ten years, and it's done right by Wikia for about eight. Even on wikis where comments are enabled, the comments are directly connected to the main article space.

But now, you're saying, "Let's keep open the comments or the talk pages but also encourage people to start a discussion somewhere else entirely." That doesn't make any sense to me.

It's going to be very hard to explain to people what that "start a discussion" button is for, and why they can't use it just to talk about how dreamy David Tennant's sideburns are.

I can see that on some wikis it might be a great idea. But not at ours. It has the easy potential to conflict with tardis:discussion policy, tardis:spoiler policy and others.

Practically speaking, though, there's nowhere for people to file discussions that they've started from an article page. We're not going to create a board that would allow for discussions about single pages, so what's the point in having the ability to do so?

I can easily see that, though I am quite enthusiastic about the new forums, this could be a deal breaker. I have to at least change the MW messages associated with RelatedDiscussions to point out that it's mostly a violation of local policy to actually use the feature. So what's the point of it?

Please just let us quietly kill this feature.