Board Thread:New Features/@comment-26522807-20160208225359/@comment-24473195-20160225234357

Cqm wrote: I think you're missing the point of what software should do. Over on RSWiki, we have a highly complex setup using DPL, Lua, Abusefilters and JavaScript to keep the wiki running smoothly. It's all hacked together with no real thought of maintainability because it works and there's next to no other alternative. There's features that would allow us to improve all of this so we never had to deal with it. But they're not available on Wikia because it's too difficult to upgrade and Wikia don't have the resources to spend on making something for us to use. I highly doubt there's a silver bullet in the latest version of MediaWiki that will magically solve all issues RSWiki has. While a newer version of MediaWiki may have new attractive features, it also comes with its own sets of bugs, that may or may not create worse issues. A quick evaluation of en.wiki's village pump reveals that despite having a more recent version they still seem to face a lot of the challenges Wikia's wikis.

That being said, I have nothing against  upgrading the software. It just seems that there is a perhaps an unfounded optimism that it will fix several issues with Wikia.

There is a very big difference between perceived usefulness, adoption and actual usefulness. Just because new features exist and are perceived as useful doesn't mean they will be adopted and are truly useful.