Board Thread:New Features/@comment-26339491-20191016152503/@comment-26339491-20191021192110

SlyCooperFan1 wrote: Mira Laime wrote:

Sophiedp wrote: Mira Laime wrote: It's possible, but would require some engineering. What would you want to use that for? SU uses it for doing announcements about the wiki and etc (kinda like the technical update threads here on CC) That's an important use case, but it does it need its own category? You could have a general "wiki business" category where anyone can post, but only admin announcements get an actual notification sent out. I would like to echo this request. My wiki has an "Announcements" post category in the Community Feed to mimic one of the Special:Forum boards where we would post announcements and allow users to scroll back through the official announcements. As it is right now, any user can post in the Announcements category; one user recently posted "it's my birthday" in there. We would like to be able to restrict at least one category to only admins and mods being able to create topics (not replies; all users should be able to reply as normal). So yes, this would be a helpful feature to have.

I should make mention of the fact that the actual Announcements feature itself has no such log for users to go back through a wiki's previous announcements, especially those that occurred before the user joined, in case they wanted to see previous important discussions. A good point: We're well aware that the one-announcement-at-a-time limit is pretty restrictive and that many admins are missing a better way to inform community members about multiple things. I can't promise there will be a fix soon, but at least it's high on the list of things we'd like to work on once there is available engineering budget.

Other well-known issues are how disconnected Discussions "feels" from the rest of the wiki (though we've made some improvements this year with theming that echoes the wikis design and article tagging), and that it doesn't accommodate powerusers, such as many of you are, very well. It's not very comfortable to use if you want to see a lot, be methodical rather than just randomly browse, or if you need to carry out moderator duties. We're not able to address these right now, given all the UCP work our engineers have to do, but at least we are able to make updates to Discussions after, and generally in the future. DPL forums are not likely to receive updates, so if you opt to use those, what there is now is what you get. 7 GRAND UMP wrote: Hi, bureaucrat of the Plants vs. Zombies Wiki here.

Our community relies on forums for its main discussions (outside of Discord, which replaced chat long ago), as most users there do not like the Discussions feature (except for the 5 or so people who hang out in there because mobile restricts forums from existing.)

How are we supposed to deal with this? All of our game discussions, features, news, and other stuff are handled on the forums, and there's no way our staff team will be willing to move to Discussions. We have little time to try and work up a solution, and we have to account for everyone when coming up with a solution. From what I've heard, the DPL thing is also extremely outdated (another bureaucrat from our wiki stated this in an above reply.)

I really wish we would have more time before you guys retire the feature. It's only 3 months until the forums get taken down, and that time flies.

Why don't staff members want to move to Discussions? Is it that they're less or not at all familiar with it and therefore feel uncomfortable, which could possibly be alleviated if they casually started using Discussions now, while the Forums are still around as a backup? Or are there things they are currently doing as part of their role that they flat-out can't do with Discussions? What are they? Depending on the concrete issues you're facing, Fandom staff may be able to at the very least give advice.

@AimeePlaysMSM: Thanks for your very detailed feedback on what exactly your community has found to be unhelpful about Discussions! Even though our developers don't have the capacity to work on Discussions right now, it still helps us hone in on those things they really should address first once they do.