Board Thread:Technical Updates/@comment-26339491-20181129221531/@comment-27151416-20181130185012

Hello. I'm an Administrator for the Vs Battles Wiki and I have a few concerns I'd like to raise regarding this development. Hope that they can be listed to.

I personally think that this is a terrible idea, and very much a case of "trying to fix what isn't broke". Forum Highlights have worked well for countless communities for years on end, and taking it away would severely inconvenience the work of Administrators, who will now have to take multiple steps to do what they once could at the press of a button.

I sincerely hope it's not late enough for Fandom to reconsider this decision.

Continuing, there's a few more things I'd like to talk about...

Mira Laime wrote: We're open to possibly raising the "one announcement at a time" limit, if it's really necessary - but so far, we've not actually seen any communities having an issue with that limit. A number of admins have expressed their worries that one at a time isn't enough, but those are actually usually communities that haven't even started using Announcements yet.

(...)

If your community is the exception and really needs more than one announcement at a time, and you have already tried Announcements for a while and found the limit to be a genuine problem - do please send us your example via Special:Contact!

VSBW is one such Community. We have tried to use the Announcement System and found it to be worse than the Forum Highlight system we are accostumed to. Furthermore, our Community is set up in such a way that makes Forum Threads and Highlighted Threads an essential part of the experience, and vital for the continued survival and growth of our community.

Far more so than any other Wiki I've seen, it's not unusual for there to be numerous threads with hundreds of posts going on simultaneously - often related to completely different subjects and featuring interactions from completely different people. The very broad nature of Vs Battles Wiki allows for fans of a wide number of series to discuss and have fun there, be them fans of anime and manga, western comicbooks, TV Shows such as Doctor Who, works of literature, tabletop games, live-action movies, video games, etc.

So not only taking away Forum Highlights - But also restricting the ability to have multiple highlights at once, and eventually removing forums altogether would kill our community.

It would be a severe blow that would hinder our community's ability to progress forward as strong as it is today. So when you say that you haven't heard about specific communities that depend on multiple highlights and forum threads, consider what I tell you.

Vs Battles, one of the most popular and active communities in all of Fandom, absolutely needs the forum system and highlights to survive. Threads constitute the most active part of our community by a landslide, and they are necessary to keep it working.

If there is any way to make an exception for Vs Battles, allowing our community to keep the ability to have multiple highlights, and not remove our forum system, I would be forever grateful. I want nothing more than to continue working to expand our community on the Fandom platform, but I'm afraid that it won't be possible to continue if things keep moving as they are now.