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. (There is also no feedback after entering an invalid "topic", which doesn't help the confusion.)

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.