Board Thread:New Features/@comment--20170207162850/@comment--20170208061131

To address a previous question - "What sorts of newer content tools are these resources being directed to? What tools might get focus for repairing?"

For newer content tools, it's not something I can go into many details about, either because talks about what we could do are high level and in the very early planning stages OR I don't want to commit one tool having one specific feature that it doesn't wind up ultimately having.

I will say that Discussions is indeed being actively designed to handle a lot of the social use cases Top 10 Lists did have for discussing rankings and there is more effort planned into adding options and flexibility in Discussions for these kind of conversations. Additionally, we have a team at Fandom whose sole purview it is to investigate and implement some radical contribution ideas and they've presented a few prototypes to Council that show some real promise and are targeted for development later this year.

As for what might get repaired - Our older and legacy features are maintained by an engineering group at Fandom called the Sustainment Team. They spend development cycles, what we call "sprints" here, to fix bugs on a feature and then move on to the next one in the next cycle. They did a bunch of work on Chat in December and are currently cleaning up some Message Wall/Forum architecture.

After looking at the analytics, we decided that fixing Top 10 Lists properly would take a number of these cycles, which is obviously stealing development time (at least a month) from any other legacy feature - Core MediaWiki improvements, staff tools, Search, etc., etc., After looking at the numbers and gauging user sentiment, we decided ultimately it would be in everyone's best interest if we went ahead and retired the tool as opposed to try to refactor it.