User blog comment:Dopp/Communicate Easily with Message Wall/@comment-1922674-20110926200009

A few functional things that really concern me:

1) Anons won't get notifications. While this may not be a huge problem for smaller wikis, this is absolutely detrimental to larger wikis which may experience significant amounts of vandalism from anonymous users. Normally, we revert such edits and leave a message on the offender's talk page informing them about their vandalism. Most of the time, these users will halt their vandalism when they notice that we have a large userbase who constantly revert vandalism. Even worse, when a user makes a good faith edit that needs to be undone for a specific reason, there are two things that an editor may do. They may give an explanation in the summary of the edit and/or place a message on the user's talk. Many times, the explanation may not fit in the summary box, and it's much more convenient to place the reason on a talk page. Not being able to do this is absolutely frustrating to me.

2) Old talk pages will be archived and will not be editable by anyone other than staff. Seriously? There is a significant amount of maintenance that is done to archived talk pages. In fact, most of it NEEDS to be done. Let's say a file is moved or deleted, and the file is located on the talk page of a user. If these links cannot be commented out or fixed, then these red links will clog up Special:WantedFiles and Special:WantedPages. It should be clearly evident that performing maintenance tasks will become exponentially harder with a growing number of these red links being due to an archived and protected talk page that only staff may edit. If necessary, I will Special:Contact every single red link that is left and expect every single one of them to be fixed in a timely manner.

3) Only sysops and (maybe?) the user in question can revert spam messages. I cannot express how many times a day that non-sysops revert various vandalism either by a different user or by the user in question (i.e. blanking or adding nonsense to warnings). Stuff like this happens every day on larger wikis and it's complete ignorance to believe that regular users shouldn't be able to revert vandalism that they see. I find this completely absurd.

4) Every comment block will have its own subpage on the talk page in question. If I understand the implementation of this system correctly, then it will be similar (not the same, I believe, but similar) to how blog /article comments work. Every single editor that I know of on the RuneScape wiki makes extensive use of Special:RecentChanges to find and quickly revert vandalism. I don't know ANYBODY that uses Wiki Activity. And if they do use Wiki Activity to fight vandalism, it will have most likely have been reverted long ago and the offender will probably have been already blocked. This system completely clutters the Recent Changes and really turns it into a complete mess. This would just complicate things for a very minor "improvement". The only positive benefit that I can see you attesting to is that it will make it easier for newbies to use this. If they can't figure out that clicking the button to leave a "new message" does exactly that, then they probably aren't older than 13 years old. And if my memory serves me correctly, that's the minimum age required to hold a Wikia account according to the Terms and Conditions.

I really hope that this will not be pushed onto all wikis. It's definitely clear from the comments preceding mine that all users who have posted an opinion (except for maybe 2) aren't comfortable with this change. I can really only see two courses of action should this be pushed onto us. It wouldn't be extremely difficult to do so, but we could give every user a subpage of their userpage and designate it as their talk page, e.g. User:Suppa chuppa/Talk. Then, we could implement a script that notifies users via a bubble if their talk page has been updated since they last checked it either through watchlist or a saved cookie. While this would be a somewhat tedious task and may leave out users who don't have javascript enabled (probably a very small percent), I believe it would be much more functional than the version that you're trying to push onto us. The second option, of course, is to leave Wikia for a different wiki farm, but that also has its drawbacks. Well-established wikis would have a very difficult time getting their viewer base back up to even half of the number that it was before a fork. Additionally, there may be users who stay back, so the user base will also be split. I don't really believe this is the way to go, but I think that honestly, the best solution is to just think about the consequences of making something as big as this mandatory and realize that most users will be happier if this were something each wiki could individually decide on.