Board Thread:New Features/@comment-26339491-20191016152503/@comment-27661991-20191022053923

Mira Laime wrote: @AimeePlaysMSM: Thanks for your very detailed feedback on what exactly your community has found to be unhelpful about Discussions! Even though our developers don't have the capacity to work on Discussions right now, it still helps us hone in on those things they really should address first once they do.

I don't know if I would categorize it as unhelpful. Discussions is used in our community, and I'm sure that once the Forums are no more there will be a decent amount of conversion from its frequent users to Discussions instead. It is a useful feature, for the community and Fandom both, and I fully understand the sentiment behind "Casual conversations can be had [in Discussions]."

At the moment it's not really advertised much in our wiki - then again, neither are our Forums, people just seem to find their way there via word of mouth or curiosity and going through the menus.

For technical discussions, we're currently looking at using DPL, and/or just sticking to e.g. the Talk pages (it's easy to forget those exist when there's also Forums, Article Comments, and Discussions) for articles where the discussion would be most relevant.

Those holding on to the ability to use wikitext / templates for their Forum games do not appear to have any other choice - migrating to a different Forum may give them the ability to make rainbow colored text, but that still won't bring back what they're looking for. We'll see what we can do to accommodate them within either DPL or dedicated pages as much as we can. Realistically, a good portion of those community members may be lost.

I don't think it would be wise for us to suggest DPL as a solution for casual users, which leaves Discussions.

I can only repeat again that I believe that Discussions is the way forward, and I think Fandom believes this as well. Which to me suggests it's worth the resources needed to capture and retain as many users as possible. You can't please everyone - those asking for wikitext may well be out of luck - but given that what I have outlined can reasonably done with an Article that links to each 'category' (the filtered results) and custom CSS (wasteful though it may be to load a bunch of content only to have a style rule display:none it all into oblivion) there's certainly a subset of users - hopefully also considered to be valuable community members - who can be pleased with relatively minor effort.

The following is only minimal CSS styling effort on my side and, while it could do with further tweaks, it already 'feels' closer to a Forum style presentation. (or perhaps feels like old.reddit.com vs new.reddit.com)

Forum: https://i.imgur.com/dFxj2IQ.png

Discussions: https://i.imgur.com/Movp42h.png

Discussions, styled for compactness: https://i.imgur.com/tgawpb5.png