User blog comment:Toughpigs/Wikia's new Forum demo/@comment-1997905-20120726050613

Oh dear god. I've been dreading this day for months.

Starting from the top - unlike the talk page/message wall situation, I think the current forums are fundamentally flawed (whereas talk pages are not), due to the fact that you need some knowledge of wikitext to create new forums or change existing ones. However, I think that would be better fixed by templating the code for a thread list (For example, the default content of Forum:Watercooler on a new wiki) and generalizing Template:Forumheader so that to create a new forum, you would only have to create the "board" page (Like Forum:Watercooler) and it to Forum:Index (frankly, you should have to create the category too, but category redlinks are another discussion). One person could spend 5-10 minutes to implement this solution, as opposed to what I know was a long development cycle by an entire team of programmers that, were you to do some economic analysis, probably cost Wikia a great deal of money. But what's done is done, and I know this won't fall off by the wayside just because there's a better solution somewhere out there in the universe.

Now basically, this is message wall ported to a new discussion space, and you already know what we don't like about that. So I'll skip to the new things:
 * 1) I like that the board list is on a special page. Using the special page interface that MediaWiki already has was a good choice.
 * 2) Like the name "message wall", the "kudos" button is a blatantly obvious attempt to imitate facebook. That's all I have to say about it; it's really just appalling. I don't think Wikia should strive to become a social network, but even if it does, at the very least it should attempt to be more original than changing the word like to kudos.
 * 3) It does not cannibalize the Forum: namespace. This is good, because since the current forums don't use any magic (user talk pages, for example, when edited will notify the owner), there's no reason for this to be mutually exclusive with the current forums, meaning it should be a simple task to make this optional like message wall.
 * 4) Like message wall, I can delete other people's messages and view the source of people's comments.
 * 5) Board pages use x days/minutes/hours ago instead of an actual timestamp. Bad. Although the actual threads themselves use good timestamps (or respond to some preference I set and forgot about), the boards should too (or respond to the same preference).
 * 6) Uses the same Thread: namespace as message wall. These should probably be separate (but should not use the Forum: namespace) because message walls and forums have two different purposes.
 * 7) Boards list active discussions. I would be interested in knowing what the mechanism by which discussions are marked active or inactive is.
 * 8) Boards list the number of replies to each thread. This is good, and I really have nothing else to say about it.

Overall, good enough as long as it's optional. Bonus points if it won't kill the current forums.