Board Thread:New Features/@comment-26339491-20191016152503/@comment-26339491-20191017221130

I can ask the staff member who enabled Discussions on the Yellow Undertale Wiki, though I doubt they remember who requested it, or even where - it's possible that wasn't even via our support system, but via Slack, a message wall, any conversation with staff anywhere.

Message Walls will get a replacement, as is mentioned in the blog post. And Admins and Moderators can edit Discussions posts at any time. Regular users can't because they'd otherwise have the power to retroactively remove the foundation for an entire conversation, rendering replies meaningless, or trolling people by switching their original post around later.

Fandyllic wrote:


 * It keeps being mentioned that thread-style Forums are a mess on the back end and cause various problems for FANDOM behind the scenes. I don't dispute this, but who is responsible for this mess? FANDOM can only point back to itself. A proper dev organization either wouldn't have let this happen and get so bad or would have re-factored or rewrote that bad parts at least in stages over time to avoid the disaster that became inevitable.
 * The killing of thread-style Forum is purely a business decision and reflects the lack of technical expertise in FANDOM dev and the poor planning of the past. If FANDOM staff did a better job of offering alternatives to soften the blow, I would have more sympathy, but it seems their basic stance is: tough sh!t.
 * FANDOM staff underappreciates, underestimates, and takes for granted the amount of volunteer help they get from the community and long time admins. Personally, I'm finally tired of it after over 10 years. I came back to Wikia/FANDOM after the Oasis Wars, but I guess one can only take getting punched in the face so many times.

Of course Fandom is responsible for the un-updatable mess that is Forums (and Message Walls, Article Comments, Achievements, Chat ...). Those features were built years ago with no regard to the future. Of course that should have been done differently, and solved much earlier with more care. We are not arguing that point at all. What we do have to do is make the best with the unfortunate situation we're in now and do our best not to repeat these mistakes. Fandom has a very different engineering organisation now than it did when these features were built. Our leadership has changed and our community team has considerably changed this year as well.

Despite all of that, the Forums are still a feature we can't carry any longer. For every user who is very disappointed about Forums going away are many others who will benefit from the changes we can finally make once they're gone (and sometimes those are the same people).

We'll be reaching out to the remaining active Forum communities to make sure they're fully aware the feature is now at long last really being retired, and support them in the transition as best we can. But we really can't get around this step.