User blog comment:Cristina7/Introducing Discussions, a New Platform For Engaging Your Community/@comment-749631-20160929033505/@comment-5275700-20161003200918

1, 4 - The ways templates are used in Forum today continues to be of great interest and will inform future development in Discussions. Thanks for the example from kancolle, please continue to provide more.

2 - Following (watching/subscribing to specific posts) will allow for monitoring of specific conversations. We're aware of the desire for an general activity stream as well. I will note that the presence of Forum (and Message Wall and Comments) in RecentChanges was always something that the overall community felt divided about, and direct integration of Discussions in that page is not likely.

3 - From the example it looks like you're talking about a record of community decisions. Discussions has categories and those can be used to sort specific types of conversations. As search expands to include Discussions, that should make things easier to find as well (more than even now).

5 - As noted in the FAQ, voting/polls is one area where we’ll be doing specific development for Discussions

6 - I'm not sure what you mean by "answers are hidden and nowhere to be seen". Like on the Forum and with many other conversation tools, you need to click/tap through to the dedicated page for that specific thread, to see the replies to the original post. On the main post list it's clear how many replies a specific post has received, so nothing is hidden or undiscoverable. Use of categories (and moderation) is the way to make sure different types of conversations stay properly organized.

7 - Use of wiki-style forums is not affected by the presence of Discussions on a community.

8 - Highlighting is not possible at this time, but that type of functionality will be coming with an updated Notifications system.