User blog comment:MisterWoodhouse/The first specifics on the Unified Community Platform/@comment-33280940-20191016153001/@comment-3452092-20191016155320

On the most active wiki I'm on, article comments are very much a necessity. We have way more active commenters than active editors on the wiki, discussing the latest content and theories about what might happen next. It's much more organized than discussions and there are people on the discussion board that never come to the main board and vice versa. Improved mobile will definitely help, but the limits of discussion are pretty clear and they can become such a muddle. The platform is bulky and hard to locate things. There is no way that I've found that allows for searching and if there is, it's so well hidden that I can't find it.

I'm most concerned with the potential loss of content that transferring over may create and I hope that they are very careful not to loose content on our message walls and our article comments. It would be nice if they could find a way to connect the discussion board to the articles, so that it could act as a kind of article comment center, such as if someone created a discussion thread and tagged one of the articles, there would be a list of all discussion threads tagged to a particular article, so people could look at them and see which threads discussed the articles that interested them. If they did that. . . discussion boards would become 10x as useful to my community and potentially would find a way to connect the two parts of our community together instead of having us separated. It would be even better if, in addition to this idea, the tags on discussion would create links to the articles themselves so that people discussing them on discussion could go and find the related articles. Do that and it would make it even more useful.

Overall, I see the potential for good and I see the potential for great harm. I'm hoping for good and I know that they plan for good, so as long as they keep listening to fandom users, this can work. Hopefully it's a smooth ride rather than a bumpy one on the way.