User blog comment:Toughpigs/Wikia's new Forum demo/@comment-3366778-20120726002812

I'm going to open up with this: "MediaWiki's standard Forum namespace is basically just blank pages that you can put templates on -- they don't offer a lot of the features that a Forum usually does." Do you not realize that this is a wiki'', not a forum site? >.> If shouldn't have the the features a "forum usually does."

As for, how you claim, the "more efficient way to have wiki-wide conversations," I don't see what you're going with on these.

"Discussions are threaded, so you can follow individual conversations rather than pages with multiple conversations"

Are you implying that forums have multiple discussions? From what I've seen, if you're doing a forum right, you either separate the page into different sections (which in comparison to this new system, saves a page load or two) or you make separate forums...

"Notifications, both on-wiki and in e-mail, help you keep track of the conversations you're involved in"

Maybe on-wiki notifications could be neat since most users don't follow their forums. In addition at Monobook Wiki, we use a repsonse template for when users' forum(s) have been repsonded to, and this part of the update would make that better.

"Wiki admins can create Boards to organize threads We already have subsections you can put forums in... If staff actually used'' wikis, they'd know that. >.>

"Threads are automatically sorted by most recent reply, or by most active thread"

Forum: namespace threads in Forum:Index are already organized by most-recent reply. In addition, if you're having trouble finding the forum that you would need a different way of finding it, that's what categories are for...

"Automatic signatures and timestamps"

Because people really don't need to learn how to add sigs to their messages. >.> I swear, this is why users don't know how to sign their posts – because Wikia makes these comments that automatically do that for them; people are lazy, and that's a bad thing on an encyclopedia site.

"A new way for admins to highlight discussions that they want everyone on the wiki to see -- a more efficient system than the Community Corner! :)"

Maybe one of the better fixes, but only because it doesn't really affect the forums themselves. Maybe you guys should take a hint here and not mess with our forums, rather things like this that make forums more easily found. I've worked on several wikis in which only maybe 3 users at most frequent the forums unless that forum is literally shoved down the userbases's throats, and even then, maybe a maximum of 7 users will post on the forum(s).

It's rather sad Wikia took this turn. I do hope they'll make the decision to at least make this optional for wikis, but y'know, we're only in the beginning stages of this change, so, maybe they'll come around to notice that this isn't a good idea. Meh.