User blog comment:Jenburton/Coming Soon: Message Wall in Labs/@comment-737801-20111024221751/@comment-1788742-20111024230605

I didn't say they were inherently superior, and if I came across that way, I apologize. I, too, am not a fan of extremely flashy signatures, but at the moment Message Wall introduces more problems than it solves. Like you said, the pagination and threading system are problems that need to be addressed. However, the message wall looks like article comments, complete with avatars. I'm not heartbroken it omits signatures, but automatic signatures surely wouldn't be too difficult to create without overhauling the system.

If Wikia can genuinely make a feature better than talk pages, I will reevaluate my opinion. But right now all I see is a buggy, problematic, and unprofessional looking feature that simply raises more problems than it solves (For example, ordinary users can remove spam from talk pages. On Message Wall, only administrators can.) This could be extremely problematic for wikis.

And I don't agree that professional and unprofessional are a highly subjective argument. Talk pages can be messy, and like I said, they're not perfect. But they are extremely superior to the Message Wall in my opinion.

Of course, some users will maintain the opposite. Which is why the staff should save themselves a lot of trouble and let wikis make their own conclusions about Message Wall, and make it 100% optional.