User blog comment:BertH/New Forums now available in Labs/@comment-452-20121130021345

Topics!

Good idea, but perhaps a name change from "Topics" to "Related Pages", so it's more obvious what the purpose is? At first I assumed it was a "tag" kind of thing, so I think it's likely that other people may try to use it that way as well.

Having autocomplete for that field works in theory, although the first time I tried to use it I typed "test help topic" so fast that it didn't pop up with any "T..." article suggestions.

I'm not sure if I like the addition of the "Start a Discussion" section at the bottom of pages - is this another attempt to replace talk pages? It's a good idea in theory as it would allow the "articles comments" - which I don't have enabled - to be merged into forums. Although the fact that talk pages are still enabled may cause confusion about where people are supposed to talk about pages.

I would definitely appreciate the integration, although I'd have the same concern about locking unfinished discussions without a convenient way to manually re-create them as threads.