User blog comment:Toughpigs/Wikia's new Forum demo/@comment-5473581-20120726035605

A question immediately springs to my mind: What are your plans for the old forum?

With the Message Wall, the switchover wasn't/isn't handled very well. Old Talk Pages became archived, and only admins can edit them - there were still many open conversations on those talk pages, so it was a little abrupt to lock them.


 * Solution: Add "editwallarchivedpages" to the "Users" group -452 (talk) 19:17, January 6, 2015 (UTC)

This problem will be even more pronounced with Forums - often there are open questions which may still require a response, and locking them all would be detrimental to any wiki which values such things.

Grandfathering the old forum posts in somehow would be far better than locking them. Simply providing local admins with a method of migrating old posts would be a great way of dealing with it.

While I understand that converting old style talk pages to message wall posts isn't something that could be easily automated, even with a one-at-a-time migration tool, forums are pages, which have a creator, which can be read by the migration tool and used to author the new "post" based on the old forum page.

At the very least, leave forum pages writable, even if creating new pages in the Forum namespace is locked.