User blog comment:Cristina7/Introducing Discussions, a New Platform For Engaging Your Community/@comment-5288784-20160909171934

Okay, since we are talking about the future de facto mandatory feature, I shall provide constructive feedback to make the transition be as little problematic as possible. Please, forgive me if some of these are already implemented or close to, since I'm not very well familiarized with it yet.

1.Highlighting — highlighting has become the most common way of providing important news (both wiki-related and fandom-general) all users shall read (at least the first post of it), at the same time directing to its discussion area. Without it, the next best thing is community corner, and then we would need a separate links.

2.A better connection to the RC – I understand the approach of report-based moderation and it might "cure" admins of checking every single new post on the wiki, but RC entries also essentially serve as thread "advertisement". I fear this might actually lower the participation among some of the more wiki-focused users.

3.Let moderators know that post need attention – I fear some backlogs in moderating may be caused not by insufficient cadre numbers, but all admins focusing on the wiki and its RC and forgetting to check up on discussions.

4.Internal links – it doesn't need to be wikitext-based, but why do I need to copy/type the entire URL for internal addresses – this is against the most basic of wikitext experience.

5.Template transclusion? – I know, this can be hard, so let me focus on the "discussion templates" – in our case they work as image macros or a decorative "funny" divs with predefined text and image. Like XKCD's "citation needed" image.

6.More upvote transparency – let us know who upvoted something, disallow self-upvote, or implement auto-self-upvote. Currently, if I see a post with one or two kudos, it makes a great difference if it was a proper upvote, or just poster's vanity. Auto-self-upvote could alternatively ensure everybody starts on even level.

7.Let us watch whole categories – some people watch boards not just for moderating, but just because they want to participate and be helpful to people looking for answers.

This is everything that came up to my mind right now. I'll let you know if I have more.