Board Thread:New Features/@comment-26339491-20191016152503/@comment-9605025-20200115071629

Fandyllic, you are correct in that it isn't obvious to us who are unfamiliar with the code for threaded discussions that they will break with a MediaWiki upgrade. From what I can tell, the basic concept should definitely still be viable. That being said, there could still be compatibility issues due to the specific implementation. If past descriptions of its development are accurate, then that wouldn't surprise me.

Therefore, I am also not surprised that Wikia would want to get rid of it so they can have a relatively fresh start with the UCP. Wikia could, in theory, develop a new implementation that is more update friendly. However, given that they have already sunk time into Discussions and it meets 100% of the need for most (supposedly, I don't have actual stats) wikis, I can't fault them for wanting to just move forward with Discussions instead.

All that said, it still seems to me that getting wikitext into Discussions would not be all that difficult. I have no knowledge of CORS and all that other security stuff, so maybe there is an issue there. However, when it comes to being able to parse wikitext, I don't see why it couldn't be something as simple as a JS script that runs on page load. It isn't difficult to send api.php wikitext and get back the HTML. Perhaps it would be a server load issue?