User blog comment:Jenburton/Coming Soon: Message Wall in Labs/@comment-755865-20111025201502/@comment-1788742-20111025202206

Agreed, glad to see it's not just me who thinks this needs to be optional. Even if it's better than talk pages, it still should be an option. I'm all for updates and new features. But replacing features with something that's worse than the original. No. I will certainly leave feedback for the staff on how they can improve Message Wall, but I still think it needs to be optional, even if it was better than talk pages.

If Message Wall is so appealing that all wikis will want to use it over user talk pages, then it should, naturally, be implemented on all wikis by the communities without having the staff pushing it at us. It can even be the default option if the staff wants. But it still needs to be completely optional, even if the final feature is better than user talk pages, which, judging from the fact that it looks unprofessional and the fact that MediaWiki wasn't designed for this, it won't be.