Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-35616940-20190108123125/@comment-9605025-20190110010201

Just to clarify, incase things are still a bit confused, user talk pages is part of the default format of MedaiWiki. Every namespace has an associated talk namespace and every page has its own talk page. The purpose is to provide a space for users to discuss the content of the given page. Article comments, blog comments, and message walls have been added as thread-based alternatives for having these discussions. These "newer" systems run along side the talk namespaces meaning that they can be enabled at the same time.

With regards to forums, there is the old wiki-style forums which adds a few namespaces and a couple of navigation pages (such as "Forum:Index"). However, the discussions themselves are held on pages that, aside from being in a particular namespace, work just like any other page. This particular format can be enabled and run along side Forum or Discussions and can still be enabled if your wiki doesn't have it. The thread-based forums, Forum, are what we are using right now and is analogous to article comments, blog comments, and message walls. It is this feature that is being replaced with Discussions. New wikis must use Discussions and, supposedly, all older wikis will be forced to convert at some point.