User blog comment:MisterWoodhouse/The future of Chat/@comment-25653892-20200805222523

Aah, that's a real shame but I can understand it. I agree with your conclusions and I shouldn't be surprised by this outcome. Wikichat always had its faults, so alternatives quickly outmoded it, and one of the communities I'm in was quite quick to migrate away.

I'm sure you've considered these points already, but I'd like to give my two cents on what wikichat still has going for it. Not with the unrealistic hope that this will convince the team to bring it over to the UCP, but that the feedback might be useful in other areas or something. I guess what I'm trying to say is, I hope the new iterations of other wiki features will make up for the losses from removing this one.


 * On-site integration:
 * If you had a Fandom account, you could enable and access chat (provided your device was compatible, etc.) without having to set up another account and a community server on another platform. As someone who's had to grapple with web blocking until recently, Fandom was almost always unblocked for me, so I could be sure I could access wikichat by extension&mdash;not so with off-site services, which stifled my migration. I don't think there will be a good solution for this.
 * Others could trust that your Fandom account is what your username claims. On Discord, this would require setting up a verification process on your wiki's server. Not having the foresight to do this up-front has caused issues for that aforementioned community. On the other hand, if there's a way to integrate your Fandom and Discord accounts, I wouldn't want that cross-platform presence to be visible to just anyone across all my servers.
 * Extensibility:
 * Add-ons like ChatHacks made up for many of wikichat's lacking areas, and even introduced features that I don't think alternatives have. The experience became much more robust with custom mentions, text formatting and rich media tags, typing indicators, message logging, and so on. I guess these aren't very high-priority, and some were difficult to learn to use. However, I'm troubled by how features like Discussions and comments also seem to be cutting down on features like certain formatting options.
 * There were virtually unlimited emoticons, which Discord limits unless enough members pay for Nitro and opt to Server Boost your community. Silly though it may sound, the limited emoji selection has generated recurring debate in said community, which transitioned from a vast emoticon palette on wikichat.
 * Wikichat was visually customizable through CSS, which is strictly against Discord's terms. Though Discord does provide some server appearance customization, it too requires a lot of Server Boosting, locking out the ability for many if not most wiki communities. This isn't the biggest deal for a chatroom, but I'd like to emphasize that I find good-faith CSS customization important, and that I hope wiki communities will still be able to carve out a rich visual identity on the UCP.

As a final aside: "we found that [a self-reported ‘active chat’ community] peaked at 8 concurrent chatters during observation over a week, while the very same wiki’s Discord had a minimum of 228 concurrent online users". I think this is a somewhat unfair comparison, since on Discord, online status applies across servers, whereas you're only online in the wikichats you have open. Most members of a large enough Discord server don't seem to be active on said server most of the time. I digress though.