User blog comment:Cristina7/Introducing Discussions, a New Platform For Engaging Your Community/@comment-1853435-20160914175829/@comment-5558012-20160914204827

I'll agree with you on the Visual Editor (sometimes all visual editors in general). They create formatting problems, more so creating new pages.

Insights are just like other Special pages. People can pick and choose which logs matter to them - not all of them do. Page links, to and from the page, help search bots index the pages and readers to find them hence isn't one of those useless logs. Yes, not every pages needs an infobox (some pages have a different form of "infobox," I do) and a few pages may not need an image but adding these things can make the pages more appealing to the reader (and I believe an image was stated to be a SEO boast). Insights has bugs but it's not useless because of the fact we can't exclude pages. Should we be able to exclude pages from other Special pages? I'd say not because doing so would make the Special page useless/inaccurate.

Oh Community Page. My list of disappointments for this page is great, but I just learned Staff have some improvements coming for it that might actually allow me to start using it. The pages that are up to be proofread are those that have seen a sudden increase in readers. Just because you are asked to proofread something doesn't mean there's an inherent problem with the page. Proofreading is meant to find errors that may have been missed by users. Professional writers use the practice all the time. The rank is indeed a problem I personally think shouldn't be there, but Wikia hasn't always been great with numbers.

I love using the current Forum, but I would not state it's in good shape. The code is dated, there's spotty mobile support (I'm not talking about those people that decide to bypass the mobile skin by using full site option), and there are bugs. Topics specifically have irritated me as I love to use them. They've had pagination issues for a long time (can't see past page one, take a look here on CC - not very useful). Search is a huge problem. As someone who's helped a lot of people on this forum, I've seen repeated questions so may times. A proper, functioning search could have prevented some of those duplicate questions (combined with the topics bugs, finding existing threads on Wikia sucks). One time I tried searching for an exact question I asked, but couldn't find it.

Am I happy with Discussions? Absolutely not. Is it complete? Absolutely not. Wikia operates by releasing a feature before it's completely finished. That's not surprising. If I recall correctly, they discussed their method in much more detail in last year's Community Connect. Discussions is in no state to replace Forums; Wikia was just stating their long term plan. Heck, they may work on Discussions for another year before actually taking steps to remove the Forum. Bottomline, coming from someone who likes the Forum, it's not perfect - neither is Discussions. Maybe it could if we have more patience we may see Discussions actually become a superior feature.