User blog comment:Toughpigs/Wikia's new Forum demo/@comment-781424-20120727194532

I've been expecting this feature, and it looks promising, in the context of everything else Wikia's been doing the past months.

Wikia is doing an interesting experiment. They are moving away from "pure" wiki environment, by gradually adding features that allow users to communicate through something that is not wiki pages. The "new forums" were the last missing cornerstone in this system. This approach solves a couple of problems with standard wiki communication, such as:
 * Page structure in discussions
 * People not signing posts, people signing with ~ on sites that endorse, disgustingly distractful custom signatures
 * Concurrent edits in discussions, edit wars
 * Page vandalism
 * Lack of mobile support (it's very troublesome to edit a wiki page from a smartphone, which I had to do on a few occasions)

Once this is completed, only standard wiki articles and user profile pages will be "classic" wiki pages. With all new features enabled, and when mobile support is fully implemented (it's currently incomplete for message walls and "new forums"), people will be able to participate in community discussions without doing a single wiki edit, from PCs and smartphones alike.

However, this approach brings its own problems:
 * Page fragmentation and naming. Since every post in blogs / on message walls / in new forums is a separate wiki page, it totally wrecks search. On a "pure" wiki, a search will bring results with meaningful page names, where you can instantly pick the most relevant ones. With these "chatty" features enabled, the search is nearly useless, since it tends to spam search results named "@ThreadAndfgh5112/Comment12424/..." (with contents that are hardly relevant to search terms, for added insult).
 * Proposed solution: make the search bring only one result (the first post) per message wall thread / "new forum" thread, add metadata support (see below).
 * Page categorizing. Message walls and the "new forums" use hidden metadata tags in the first post to define the displayed thread name, while true page names are arcane combinations of symbols (see above). The problem is, category pages don't support this naming system. If you add a message wall post, or a "new forum" post (doesn't matter the first post or a reply) to a category, the category will list unintelligible gibberish instead of the thread names defined by metadata tags.
 * Proposed solution: develop metadata tag support for categories, make categories display only one entry (the first post) per thread, regardless of the number posts in the thread tagged with this category. Also, add metadata tag support to RSS feeds and Recent Changes.
 * Chattiness. Ease of communication inevitably leads to tons of short meaningless posts. It doesn't help that Wikia's new communication tools are more resemblant of chats than of classic forums. Part of the reason I had to disable the blogs on our wiki (MEA) was because the quality of posts had deteriorated below tolerable level. People viewed the blogs as their personal IMs or public chats, spamming them with short junk posts. This also tends to happen with message walls to some degree, and will inevitably happen to the forums.
 * Proposed solution A: make posting in new forums, message walls and blogs require an extra button press for confirmation, ideally combined with a preview feature. This may slightly cut down on random junk.
 * Proposed solution B: introduce in-thread batch deletion tools for admins, to quickly rid threads of offtopic junk.
 * (Minor style nitpick) Wasted space, distractions. Padding and margins are very wide, and user names stand out way too prominently. Long forum posts look just fine, but short posts are hard to read (next to the distracting user name etc.), and a lot of space is wasted. On "standard" forum pages, conversations can be much more condensed.
 * Proposed solution: make user names less prominent, narrow the gap below the timestamp.

As an answers wiki administrator, I'm also interested in this feature being implemented as a central tool for Q&A, instead of "standard" wiki pages, ideally with full mobile support for answers sites, but only if the aforementioned problems will be addressed. On MEA, we're striving for quality and long-term usefulness of questions. This is only possible when questions can be categorized, and explored via search. If the problems with search / categorizing won't get fixed, the transition to this engine would just kill the long-term usefulness of question pages, wasting the work of people who answer them.