User blog:Souliousery/Why it makes sense to remove chat

Hello. Today, I will explain why it makes sense to remove chat from Fandom. Please note that this is my opinion, so don't be rude to anyone.

Chat is just outdated Discord
Chat was designed and released back in 2010-11. Back then, there was no Discord or Slack. Instead, there was MSN Messenger, Skype, Messenger, and AIM. Chat was equal in features with these platforms on release. However, over the years, Chat lagged behind from Facebook, and AIM, Skype, and MSN were replaced with Discord and Slack, which featured brand new features and better software. However, Chat lagged behind with not much feature releases and outdated menus and designs.

Comparing Discord of one wiki to chat is night and day. While the chat for Encyclopedia Spongebobia usually averages 10-20 users per day, the Discord of the same wiki is extremely higher, with way more active members. Also, Chat can and usually is hidden on wikis, which could mess with the average amount of Chat users. However, the point stands that Chat is barely used and barely updated.

Chat is based on features from old forum software
When Chat was released, forums (not the Wikia one) still had some influence on the internet. These forums are different from today's forums, which are Discussions and DPLForum on some older wikis that haven't transferred to the new systems as I'm writing this. On these forums, there was a feature on the front page called a chatbox. These usually allowed people to sign in to a forum account to communicate with each other on the front page, with some default and custom emojis on the forum. Although Chat still had some extra features, like Pings and animated emoticons, it wasn't much different, if you didn't customize the themes and you didn't install any extensions.

However, now in 2020, it looks outdated and completely different from the rest of the site. It's extremely outdated, missing many essential features in modern chat software of the modern-day. If they wanted to keep chat, you would need to revamp it completely, as well as add many more features, which would make UCP way longer to fully release. This is why software like Discord has replaced the need for Chat.

Summary
Overall, Chat is a dead feature abandoned by most users and now the developers. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.