Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-7981828-20130512212330/@comment-188432-20130715001928

You seem a little angry, and I'm not quite sure why. I didn't design the software. I'm not speaking as the Wikia employee who has a lot invested in the design. I'm just telling you as an early adopter of the new forums and someone who has sent in a gazillion suggestions about the feature, this is what I've observed. If you want stickied threads, don't use the Message Wall. It's not possible. It's not how it was designed. And it's antithetical to the underlying code design. Wall Forum simply doesn't work like Old Forum. There are few wikis that have as active a forum space as mine, w:c:tardis. And there are few users as invested in the forum and discussion process than me. So when I'm telling you that Wall Forum has dramatically and obviously improved participation in the discussion process, it's not an idle comment. The use of the red alert button? Easy. It works. People see it, they click it, and then they talk. With the Old Forum, sure we could sticky stuff. But what good are stickied threads if no one sees them in the first place? With Wall Forum, you cannot force people to go to the forum index. You just can't. It's not how this form of communication works. This software works by de-emphasising specific boards and stressing the importance of the individual thread. The way you make it work is to occasionally push an important thread to the top of the Recent Forum Activity module, so that people see the point you're trying to make. If it's really important, you un-highlight it, then re-highlight it, forcing everyone to look at the thread again. And, if you really need to make a message appear in places, you can use some javascript to bolt a short message onto the top of pages, like we have at tardis:Special:Forum. Or you can use MediaWiki:Community-corner. But if you really don't want people randomly joining the conversations they want to join, Wall Forum is really not for you. It's clearly designed to encourage participation in threads, not boards. People will always be able to bypass the individual Board index to participate in the forums. Even if you could sticky threads on individual Boards, people would still be able to bypass the Board index and go directly to threads. Look, it's not perfect software, and it's not right for every situation. But I guarantee you that if you start a conversation in Old Forum and let it go for a week, you will get fewer responses than if you start one in Wall Forum. There really is no question that you will attract more people's attention with Wall Forum than Old Forum.