User blog comment:Toughpigs/Wikia's new Forum demo/@comment-4126310-20120801174756

Well... the most pleasant thing I can say is that not everything about this is terrible? Highlighting might be useful, and no one can claim the creation of new forums is particularly easy under the old system. But please keep this optional, for the same reason that Message Walls (and, ultimately, comment sections) need to remain optional: Some wikis are more socially inclined anyway and people there might like this; more power to them, whatever. But the new forums would make a lot of wikis lose functionality they use regularly, wikis with a more professional focus on being an encyclopaedia and which are not and do not want to be a general meeting place for the fandom of whatever topic the wiki happens to cover. Give every wiki the option of saying no.

I don't speak for the My Little Pony Friendship is Magic Wiki, for instance, but I can tell you that we don't use our forum for idle chitchat about the show; we use it almost exclusively to hash out wiki business like administrator appointments, changes to the guidelines, and how to deal with discrepancies in the source material(s). The discussions that result are often quite technical and intricate and would be much harder to do and to follow with a Message Wall-type forum. And while the normal forums may be more difficult to use for beginners, beginners don't stay beginners forever, and having the forums the way they are encourages users to learn how to edit the wiki properly, which helps everyone.