Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-26407541-20150710132516/@comment-303594-20150710132959

Talk pages are better if used properly with a mature userbase. However I don't think it's worth the hastle.

In order to get them to do that, you need to train users to reply on the talk page where the message was sent, not the talk page of the receiving user. The sending user should check that page regularly for replies. This enables more than one user to be able to reply to that message, and users to be able to read back over the conversations.

What happens on wikis that don't use this system is you get users replying on the other page. Meaning that conversations can only be between 2 people, and it becomes very hard to keep track of the conversation.

Message Walls give you this functionality built-in, and so are better if you can't (or don't think you can) train your userbase to use talk pages properly. You lose the full edit box, you have a smaller area for messages, you can't have edit summaries, you have to deal with pseudopages conversations can't be moved around, you can't easily branch a conversation off to a new topic, you can't have proper threaded replies.