Board Thread:New Features/@comment-26339491-20190329181123

Today’s blog post about the new Discussions improvements was getting a bit long so we didn’t include this information there, but we'd be remiss if we didn’t talk about the strong feelings of attachment toward Forum and what this change means for some of the more advanced functionality you’ve said you and your communities need for wiki-building conversations.

For a long time we tied the fate of Forum to the development of Discussions. This was a mistake. The lack of development on Discussions meant that we created years-long anxiety about the future of Forum and whether there would ever be any replacement functionality added to Discussions. We should have treated it as two separate conversations: one, the release and development of Discussions; and two, the outdated technological underpinnings of Forum, its lack of mobile-friendliness, and how it was hacked onto MediaWiki which contributes to larger architectural problems on the site.

In addition to the lack of development on Discussions, another problem we ran into was that we leaned too far into ease of use to the point that it became more about the philosophical idea of a “lightweight contribution experience” than something that worked for all types of contributors. We hoped that categories would make it more of a wiki-based tool, but that didn’t work out the way we planned. As is often the case when you try for a one-size-fits-all solution, it didn’t end up working as well as it could have for either group of users.

The simplicity required for attracting new contributors makes it hard to use Discussions for conversations about building communities, talking about writing and editing wiki articles, or how to code or build templates. We don’t think advanced post formatting or displaying code is necessary for most people, but it is necessary for you. We wanted you to use Discussions as a place to talk about your community, but we never gave you the right tools to do that in the way you needed to.

This is still true for the new version of Discussions. It doesn’t have the structure or options needed to be a robust wiki conversation area. So it’s pretty obvious that we need to provide a place for those conversations.

We don’t know what that’s going to look like or when we might be able to make it happen, if at all, but in the meantime we’ve halted Forum migrations for the time being. We’re still doing some early thinking about this sort of functionality, and we want to work with the community to make sure that if we do build something for those needs then it does what it needs to do. But we wanted to let you know that it’s on our minds, and we know that even the updated Discussions experience doesn’t meet all of your needs.

We’ll keep you updated on any developments in that area. 