Board Thread:New Features/@comment-26339491-20191016152503/@comment-26339491-20191017195331

Andrewds1021 wrote: Well, if I am understanding correctly, they aren't really offering DPL Forum as an alternative. They are simply saying that wikis that feel wikitext is critical are free to enable DPL Forum; which has always been the case. The bottom line is that the conversion is from Forum to Discussions. Anything else is the responsibility of the wiki. At least, that it how it seems to me at this point.

Yes, that is accurate.

There are also a lot of other good points here - thanks especially to Fandyllic, Andrewds1021 and KockaAdmiralac who shared a lot of details (correctly) so I won't need to repeat them.

There are a few points of confusion, it seems:

Can you edit Forum posts once they've been migrated to Discussions?

Yes, you can edit them. Admins and moderators can edit any post at any time, even a very old one, and one that was previously a Forum post. However, all formatting will be stripped from a migrated post when you edit it.

This older blog post details what exactly happens when Forum content is migrated to Discussions. It links some (older) examples, too. At the time this was written, Discussions didn't have any text formatting yet, didn't have @ mentions or tags and still looked different, but when we migrate Forum content by mid-January, we will be using an updated version of that same script to do that, so the information in this post is still helpful.

You can't structure content in Discussions at all because it doesn't have Boards

Not quite true - Discussions lets you group content into distinct categories. Each post can only be in one category at a time, and you can filter the main feed to show you only one or several specific categories. This isn't quite the same as Boards, but serves much the same purpose. By default, Discussions comes with only one category (General), and the area where admins can create additional categories and where users can filter by category is a bit hidden, which led to the misconception that there is no subdivision, but there is.

Granted: It's not a perfect Board replacement. Some users are lazy and just leave everything in "General" even if there is a better category for it.

I'll be editing my beginning post above to answer two more of the most frequently voiced concerns: Whether you can say No to Discussions entirely, and once again why we do really have to remove Forums.

Also - re: What happened with the Yellow Undertale Wiki: I can see in our records that Discussions was enabled there in December last year, after the Forums had already been disabled in May 2017. This isn't unusual: We've had plenty of communities (some that did and some that did not have Forums) request that we enable Discussions. The log doesn't show who exactly requested that Discussions be enabled there. Fandom's old support system where that request would have been recorded is now gone, so, sadly, I can't solve the mystery of who asked for this. It doesn't look like a situation where staff just enabled Discussions without anyone's consent, since this is a smaller wiki, not featured in the Fandom app, and the staff member who did it is someone who would only make such a change upon an admin's request.