User blog comment:Jenburton/An Update on Message Wall/@comment-1714259-20111001131715

Right, thanks for giving us all a blank slate to comment on. A few things to correct/reiterate this evening.

I'm quite sure all of us understood the general direction of this wall from the first blog post. Replace the very essence of MediaWiki with Facebook. Nothing you can say - short of making this optional, changes that. While it would have been nice to see how the Message Wall worked when you clicked "post message" (or something), we all got the gist of it.

Secondly, as countless users have pointed out, why go to all the trouble of further alienating your profit generators editors  users readers when the obvious and practical solution is to simply make it optional, or even abandon this idea altogether. Everyone would be happy. I don't see the practical purposes of continuing to sledgehammer your way through all this disagreement from some of Wikia's most established and experienced editors, aside from saving your collective egos.

Before someone quotes that only 300 editors opposed this change, I'll repeat something I read further down. Do the silent millions who made <5 edits and left years ago actually agree with any of this? And please don't insult myself and the 300 strong contingent of Wikia's experienced users who commented (assuming you didn't count the flamers) by summarising all of our collective arguments into "No!". Frankly, we didn't simply shout that, well perhaps some of us did out loud at first. No, we explained why this feature does not work in a MediaWiki community, and its shortcomings when used as a communication tool.

To cap this off, I honestly don't believe that you guys would abandon this project, it would be a waste of development work and damage the aforementioned egos. But, again, on behalf of all the users in agreement with me, please consider making it something optional. It doesn't have to be a Wikia Labs thing, if it is too complicated, I'm sure everyone is happy with using Special:Contact.