User blog comment:BertH/New Forums now available in Labs/@comment-452-20121129225441/@comment-10370-20121129235837

Thanks for your comments! We do plan to build a function that lets you move threads from Message Wall to Forum and vice versa. It's always a pain to tell somebody "you started this conversation in the wrong place" -- it's a lot nicer just to move it to the place where it should be, and keep all the links and history intact.

So this release lets you move a thread from one Forum board to another; moving from Wall to Forum will be coming up.

About the transition from the old to the new -- we looked at that, and tried to figure it out. Unfortunately, there isn't really a natural mapping between the activity on a community-editable wiki page and the messages in a Forum thread.

On the MediaWiki-style Forum pages, an edit that I make doesn't equal one message. I can make an edit that fixes a link in someone else's post, or adds a signature. I can make an edit that adds a header, or moves messages around the page. So it's not a straightforward mapping where you could say "each edit = a message in this thread". You'd end up with a lot of junk in the threads.

Those conversations are an important part of the community's history, and it's really important for us to preserve those conversations, and keep them accessible. If translating them from wiki page to Forum thread adds extra junk and confusion, then that actually makes them less readable. We decided to leave them as they are -- always accessible through links, history, contributions, etc.

As the lead Product Manager working on these updates to the communication system -- it's very important to me that we don't throw away content, whether that's articles or conversations. When there are any changes to the communication features, now or in the future -- our intention is always to archive old content, and never just throw it away. Keeping old revisions is important. It's a wiki thing. :)