Board Thread:Technical Updates/@comment-24006128-20200311154142/@comment-43797581-20200316154332

Aquamarinesandopals wrote: What will happen to the comments then? Some of our pages have hundreds of comments from over 7 years, I don't think our userbase would be happy to see them vanish. I appreciate we may be atypical, but a lot of our wiki has had its culture (so to speak) grown in the comments - most of our users have been around for the whole of thsoe 7 years and considering so many of us grew up on this Wiki, I'd hope there is at least a way to archive the comments. It would be a lot of memories lost.

My issue with the RC I'm seeing isn't the content on it (though absolutely, if Wiki Activity is going then it needs to include the stuff from there), it is how it is displayed and laid out.

Wiki Activity spaces things out and gives each page being edited its own line, the name of the user and the time of the edit on another, and then has a summary on another. It is incredibly digestable for people like me (and our only other admin), with disabilities that make it hard to engage with long, seemingly endless streams of text with minimal visual difference between them.

Furthermore the look is intimidating for our casual users. It looks too technical for them. If this can be customised that is a big benefit, but if new users (our userbase is also often very young) can't navigate it they just won't stick around to find out.

Unless there are suitable replacements, losing these will be a huge detriment to us. If the RC sees no aesthetic updates to make it more accessible then I can't see us being able to move forward, unfortunately. Is it true that Article Comments will disappear? If so, I can see both positives and negatives to this decision:

The Pros: Less potential for vandalism on that front, people won't post spam anymore in comments.

The Cons: People in general wouldn't be able to share their thoughts on a subject anymore, lack of communication among the community.

To the user whose reply I quoted, I kind of feel you on the whole "losing memories on comments" type of thing; a lot of memories have been made via blog posts and comments on my main wiki, which is Arthur Wiki. Losing the comments would cut back on people posting spam, sure, but it would also lose some good memories.

On a side note, I don't get why people are complaining about Recent Changes. I personally don't mind the change over to this format. This type of format is also used on Grifkuba, another wiki site that I go on, so maybe I'm just more used to this format than others.

-Arthur Read fan