Thread:Speedit/@comment-5558012-20160911160610/@comment-26402117-20160911171108

Thanks for appreciating my personal efforts to make Discussions work! While I'd very much like mobile users to have a Mercury style mobile forum, wiki stuff will probably end up moving to old wikitext forums and project talk pages to avoid disruption.

I understand the feelings of the people in the petition after a fashion - and though the method of a petition is personally a bit iffy, I was careful to ensure the petition is not interrupted by the reply because they are free to channel their own discontent in that way. :D

To move on to my take on the Discussions themselves, established Wikians are very likely to get a large initial shock when joining a Discussions forum to interact or to also moderate. By bringing a portable forum experience to a wiki, you're gonna end up massively widening the scope and the appeal of the forum - opening the forums up to all the corners of the userbase, whether good or evil. It also will weakly attract them to the wiki they're on, although use of the Mercury skin on the desktop layout could damage this. However, one can kinda tame discussions to be a working forum of its own like on Pokémon Wiki:


 * by giving it time (a painfully significant amount)
 * nudging users to use categories correctly and fixing the wrong ones
 * nuking off-topic replies while allowing roleplay or fringe topics in posts
 * having the mods format their own comments with proper English

... and persevering until the wiki and forum modship tames the Discussions to be a working forum of its own. I'm mixed on whether discussion of the wiki currently works on Pokémon Wiki, but apparently other big beta wikis have managed to get better results on that front.

Wikitext I miss most:

Speaking of Discussions, I've personally been speaking to some users to get guidance on a little something I chucked together in GIMP. Any thoughts?