Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-35289717-20191130211650/@comment-9605025-20191202204421

There are different ways to have discussions on a Wikia wiki. There is (depending on what is enabled) live chat (/wiki/Special:Chat), Discussions/Community Feeds (/d), article comments, blog comments, message walls, Forum, DPLForum/wiki-style forums, and talk pages. Article comments, blog comments, message walls, and Forum are collectively referred to as threaded discussions because of how the data is structured. With threaded discussions, the wiki stores each comment as its own page. The page you are viewing with all of the comments is generated by retrieving the list of individual pages and then combining them into the format you see. This requires quite a bit behind the scenes which is one of the reasons why Wikia wants to get rid of them.

As with any other page, there is no "archive" option. You may see this mentioned here and there but all it really means is that the page is fully protected. In other words, only those with content moderator rights can make changes. When Wikia runs their script to remove Forum, that script will have content moderator rights. As such, "archived" pages will still be deleted.

The best you can do is preserve the content by transferring it somewhere else. To this end, Wikia's script will transfer all content to Discussions. However, Discussions is far from a perfect replacement for Forum. The biggest issue is that Discussions does not use wikitext. Therefore, any Forum post that uses wikitext will not be completely preserved and, upon editing the Discussions post, additional losses may occur. If this is an issue for your wiki (which it may not be) and you want to keep the wikitext versions, you will need to do your own separate content transfer. The most-similar feature to Forum is DPLForum. DPLForum is essentially talk pages in terms of how it works. Talk pages are essentially just regular pages except that the intended use is to hold a discussion.

Does that help clarify things? If not, what is still unclear?