Board Thread:New Features/@comment-26339491-20191016152503/@comment-26339491-20191016224705

ARavenInATree wrote: Hello! I'm an administrator for the Survivors series by Erin Hunter. Most of our wiki activity occurs in the forums and we have quite a few discussions that are currently going on. Forums have been a part of the wiki since it was created and we never migrated to Discussions. When forums are deleted, will we be forced to migrate to Dicussions or allowed to keep our current set up? When we retire the Forums we will be removing their code from out platform. That outdated, very problematic code is the entire reason why we developed Discussions in the first place. So I'm afraid no trace of the Forums will remain, and their content has to be transferred to Discussions to not get lost.

KockaAdmiralac wrote: Does that mean we can migrate our Forum thread pages to wiki-style forums manually (with all content and attribution preserved), delete all Forum thread pages and ask for Forums to be disabled, so Discussions don't get enabled on our wiki? I got the impression that you won't be enabling Discussions on wikis without Forum, but that clearly wasn't the case on the Undertale Yellow Wiki. You could move your current Forum conversations to DPL wiki pages, yes. Keeping the original edit histories with author attributions intact could be problematic, though, because each individual post and reply in the Forums is its own page, technically speaking, and a wiki-style forum conversation is on one page, edited by multiple authors. By far the easiest path would be to have Forum content moved over to Discussions by January to have it archived and not lost, but to use DPL forums for your new and future conversations, to make a gradual shift towards DPL forums as your main conversation space.

Wikis that never had Forums will not automatically have Discussions enabled, since there is no Forum content to migrate. We have, in the past, enabled Discussions on communities that didn't have Forums. Sometimes because they requested it themselves, sometimes because the community was abandoned and we hoped that might bring new users in, and sometimes - and this was not right! - against the explicit wishes of the community because we disagreed with them on whether Discussions would add value to their wiki. I don't know which of these cases applied to the Yellow Undertale Wiki, but if a wiki didn't enable Forums in the first place, they won't automatically get Discussions now.

NoWayThisUsernameIsAlreadyOwnedBySomeone wrote: When forum posts have images in them, will the migration to discussions create copies of those images and store them separately? Or will the discussion posts refer back to the images uploaded to MediaWiki?

Will it still be possible to request addition of DLP forums in the future even after the migration to discussions has long been completed? Or will DPL forums end up in the same situation that SMW currently is in (i.e. supported for wikis that already have it, but not possible to request anymore)?

When Forum content is migrated to Discussions, we won't create duplicates for those files, nor will we delete file pages for images used in the Forums. The existing file pages stay where they are, the images appear in Discussions, but admins won't have to worry about having to clean up a bunch of duplicates.

To add DPL forums, you don't have to request anything, you can just set them up - unless you've had Special:Forum enabled before, in which case the DPL forums exist on your wiki, but in an archived state. In that case, staff would have to make a change to un-archive them. That's something you can request at any time.

SlyCooperFan1 wrote: Is it now available again for admins to request a wiki to migrate Special:Forum to /f immediately, instead of waiting for January?

No, you'll have to wait. The last time the migration script was used was before we made a ton of changes to Discussions. That means it's outdated, not compatible with Discussions as it is today, and needs an update first. Only then can we migrate Forum content again. By the time we've updated the script accordingly, it's likely almost January anyway.