Board Thread:New Features/@comment-26339491-20191016152503/@comment-27661991-20191019164127

I'm a frequent wiki editor and I have to say that DPL forums are daunting. The example links in the DPL forums article show exactly what is wrong with it; some very clever people took DPL and were so preoccupied with thinking about whether they could make Forums with it, that they never stopped to think whether they should make Forums with it. Even just replying to a comment means editing the whole page, making sure you sign your edit, etc. Did I mention editing the whole page, which means relying on people not to vandalize discussions now and adding to other editors' workload to clean things up when it does happen? No thanks.

I do believe that Discussions is the way forward, if the existing Special:Forum is to be retired.

However, there is a major paradigm difference between Discussions and the Forum, which stems largely from how it is displayed. The Forums are more like a classic Forum where you have an overview of Categories, with each Category leading to an overview of Threads, and each Thread leading to a single page displaying both the submission Post and its Comments.

Discussions is currently more like a social stream, like facebook/instagram/twitter/etc. You get a long list of Posts and if you only want to see those in certain Categor(y|ies), you have to filter by them. Even then you're still hit with the post with a good chunk of content, possibly a big image, etc., not just the Post (aka Thread) title, so you have to scroll, scroll, scroll. There are clearly advantages to this as otherwise big social media platforms wouldn't be using it, but it's a really poor user experience as far as Forum replacements go.

However, setting aside some missing formatting options, the ability to easily quote a post/comment, and a few other things mentioned already that are specific to creating a post/comment, I see no reason that Discussions can't be very effectively displayed similar to the way the Forums are, which I think would get rid of the largest part of the aversion to Discussions. If we could get an option (Special:Preferences) to display Discussions in the same style as Forums in addition to the existing social stream style, I think many more people would be on board as it is far less jarring an experience. This means you can ditch the Forums code base, push Discussions as the superior alternative, and would - hopefully - only require relatively minor code changes on your end to display the exact same content in either style.

Thoughts?