Board Thread:Technical Updates/@comment-24006128-20200813184033/@comment-168424-20200819003841

MisterWoodhouse wrote: Gurte wrote:

Excuse me, but I still cannot understand the reason why Discussions were not developed initially on MediaWiki platform.

We did that. It's called Forums. The modifications to MediaWiki code necessary to build the feature made updating the core software extremely difficult. Building Discussions as a separate product removes that barrier, allowing us to update at a far more rapid cadence. Ummm... this is both evasive and does nothing to answer the question.

My version of the answer: FANDOM chose not to build Discussions on MediaWiki, because they didn't want to tie it to MediaWiki compatibility and they wanted to provide a better mobile experience that is usually lacking on most MediaWiki extensions. Most likely FANDOM never maintained any expertise in the Forum code-base as evidenced by almost no improvements or fixes over many years. Starting fresh was faster and their real customers (advertisers) don't care if it has MediaWiki/wikitext support.