Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25150955-20160909010405/@comment-27345308-20170103140726

TheFoxyRiolu wrote: Replacing a perfectly fine feature in favor for a pitiful attempt to be Twitter and Miiverse's love child. (THIS IS THE MOST PROMINENT REASON THAT I'VE SEEN BY THE WAY) I'm sorry to pop your bubble, but if you ever worked with threads in-depth, you'd notice how your "perfectly fine" feature is one of the worst MediaWiki extensions ever made. Wikia had to hack into MediaWiki so hard to make it actually work, and that produced numerous bugs and complications in the API. There were also numerous exploits in the past, such as one of the WallExternal Nirvana controller (there are never enough bugs in these Nirvana controllers) that allowed mass-creation of pages by WikiaBot. That seems to be the same bug that was producing the [ "Empty"] page wiki-widely, ever since the feature's creation. Luckily, that was fixed.
 * 1) You can edit other people's replies without being a moderator. Can you do that in Discussions? No.
 * 2) "Delete" option on threads doesn't change anything in regards to categories, links or templates that are on it. I've seen Category:Candidates for speedy deletion being flooded with threads that were "deleted" but still have the delete template on them. On the other side, if you delete them with a script such as AjaxThreadDelete that actually deletes the thread, [?redirect=no this] happens.
 * 3) Have you ever thought of how to get thread closing/removal/deletion/restoring events through the API? They are log events, but you can't see them in the log because their logtype is set to 0, and Special:Log/0 doesn't work. That's one minor hell I had to face while making WikiaActivityLogger.
 * 4) I shouldn't even bother explaining how vulnerable are Message Walls to vandals. Literally just moving a wall through Special:MovePage moves all threads on it to the new name. It also redirects a wall to some other page. Cool vandalism tactic.
 * 5) Threads keep data about the title and topics in a   tag, inside the post's content. That means putting a   tag at the end of your post will make MediaWiki not pass the tag to the parser at all (because, reasonably, Wikia didn't want to hack into MediaWiki so deep to change how nowiki tag works).

Forum is not a perfectly fine feature, because of it's various bugs and restrictions of the underlying engine, MediaWiki. Discussions are based on a completely different engine from MediaWiki which allows them to integrate a lot of new features the Forum didn't have.

It's also not quite fine they are replacing a forum with something that isn't even a forum. All hail wiki-style forums, I guess.

I've no idea why is this "petition" still going on. This is turning into a plain rant, and probably should be closed considering it was created more than 3 months ago. It's also pointless. Wikia's decision is final, Forum is going, Discussions are entering. Your "votes" aren't going to change anything.