User blog comment:Kirkburn/Technical Update: August 17, 2016/@comment-1757994-20160817230845/@comment-24473195-20160818184237

>  communities who don't even use the Special:Forum feature and continue to use wikistyle forums.

First, this will never be an issue for those communities. There is literally no way wikia can block people from discussing in wikistyle forums short of blocking editing completely. This is because the concept of forum doesn't really exist in mediawiki, and those wikistyle "things" are just linked articles on a specific namespace.

>Has anyone ever actually looked at some of the top wiki's /d sections and seen the amount of absolute garbage posted on most of them?

I have, but still see this as bellyaching. There are 7 discussion tools at the moment:


 * Wikistyle thingies (forums) / Talk pages
 * Comments on pages
 * Threads
 * Message walls
 * Blogs
 * New discussion feature
 * Chatrooms

If none of those can be used for "proper" discussion, then the only option is self-hosting and choosing or designing one's own "perfect" discussion software.