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

We announced today that in preparation for the Unified Community Platform, we will need to retire threaded forums. This will happen by mid-January next year.

If your wiki is still actively using forums, you likely have questions on what will happen specifically when the current threaded forums are, at long last, removed from Fandom and fully replaced by Discussions and/or DPL forums. Please ask them here! If many of you are wondering about the same details, I'll edit this post later to include the most frequently asked questions and their answers right here at the top.

Edit - these questions seem to be common so far, so I'm adding them here, along with their answers:

No. As we've explained in various places before, the code powering the Forums (and, incidentally, also Message Wall and Article Comments) is outdated and very problematic. We're retiring Forums because we need to remove that code from our platform in order to make crucial changes. That means: Any content you have in your Forums that is not migrated to Discussions will be completely deleted by mid-January. You will no longer have a "Forum" link in your local navigation bar. You will no longer be able to use or even see the Forums.
 * Can my wiki just keep the Forums?

The DPL forums are essentially just regular MediaWiki pages in a specific setup. As such, they will not go away with the UCP. You can set them up as explained in this guide at any time: Now, tomorrow, after the UCP launches. You do not need any staff permission to do this - except if your wiki has or has in the past had Forums enabled, in which case a Fandom staff member needs to un-archive the "Forum:" namespace. You can request this at any time as well: Now, tomorrow, after the UCP launches.
 * (How) Can you move Forum content to DPL forums?

We have not yet explored in detail how a community might switch to DPL forums. We have an automated script that can convert Forum content into Discussions content, but we do not have any automated process to convert it into DPL forum pages, nor will we create one. Both Forums and DPL forums operate on MediaWiki, but Forum posts are each their own individual MediaWiki page with one author, while a conversation in the DPL forums takes place on one page, with multiple authors, like a regular article. You can copy a Forum conversation into a DPL forum thread, but it would be a very manual process.  