User blog comment:Cristina7/Introducing Discussions, a New Platform For Engaging Your Community/@comment-1895174-20160910185259

So far the Discussions feature seem to be designed around brief, highly-specific discussions; essentially a Reddit-lite. The Forums, on the other hand, are used for administrators and active editors to discuss the state of the wiki, settle disputes, make announcements to the community at large, and to have longer-form, general discussions about a certain topic so editors do not flood the wiki with similar discussion posts. Personally, I've been involved in a few forum threads where the discussion has been ongoing for well over a year. They are one of the most important tools in establishing a community on a wiki, so the site is more than just a number of individuals not talking to each other and hammering away on their keyboards hoping to turn out something up to the wiki's standards.

In other words, their use could not be more different. Without large, structural changes to the platform, Discussions are at the moment ill-equipped to replace Forums. Administrators (which need to be the wiki's admins, not a separate group) need to be able to sticky discussions, as well as highlight certain discussions so everyone - both registered editors and unregistered visitors - can see them immediately upon visiting the wiki. Editors need to be able to follow discussions. There needs to be a desktop layout. Discussions either need to support wikitext or some alternative that makes it easy for editors to link to wiki pages and to other discussions. From the FAQ, it seems there are plans to implement only a few of those, and the last point might not even be possible.

The only advantage Discussions appear to have the Forums is that they are more mobile-friendly, but for all the reasons Forums are useful Discussions fall short. Wouldn't it be easier to find some mobile-friendly layout for Forums than to make all of those changes to Discussions and to migrate everything over from one platform to the other? Is there any reason why Forums need to be phased out to support Discussions in the first place?

Side Question: What percentage of those 50% of new accounts created for the discussions go on to become active editors?