User blog comment:Jenburton/Coming Soon: Message Wall in Labs/@comment-737801-20111024221751

Well I can say that I will fight to not enable this on the ME wiki, and I have little doubt that the community will be behind me. This feature has so many flaws that have been pointed out by so many people, including myself, that for Wikia considering this an "adequate" replacement for talk pages, is in all honesty, laughable. All of the limitations are in the heads of Staff Members and i beg them to realize this and instead of forcing this down our throats, and choking us in the process with yet another uselss Facebook inspired social media feature, consider this making it optional. You've heard so may calls to make it optional, that if you don't, then the staff does nothing but slap everyone in the face and say "we are the gods here and we don't even remotely care what you say. What we say is law and if you don't like it, then we don't care." That is harsh, but it's the truth. Make this feature optional or you will lose people, wikis, and all credibility for delivering quality new features. This is a complete waste of time, money, and our time. The community doesn't want it, or at least the vast majority of them don't, and therefore making it optional by wiki is the best thing you can do. It makes everyone happy. You support article comments AND talk pages, so to say that you can't support both user talk pages, and Facebook-cloned message walls, is something that I can't even consider.

This feature will do nothing but reduce talk pages to message walls with messages like:
 * hi how are u
 * fine thx

This feature takes away one of the best tools for communication and replaces it with a Facebook clone of something that they find useful and that works on Facebook, but NOT ON A WIKI. If the staff sees an up in communication, then it will be only with short chatty messages, and if they consider that an improvement, then someone really needs to look up what the word improvement means.

I plead with the staff to realize a mistake before they make a big one as you are going down a slippery slope and you aren't going to recover. STOP forcing social media features down our throats when we don't want them. You are choking us with all of the features you have come out with, which have many bugs that you haven't fixed, that if you don't make this optional, then all we will be left with is a completely useless feature that will be buggy, annoying, and will do nothing but reinforce the social, not the content side of a wiki.

A wiki is about content FIRST, socializing SECOND. THis feature forces us to use a feature that will distract from the content and if Wikia keeps going along this path, then all they will be left with is social media hubs instead of wikis, social groups instead of users, and a bunch of chat room instead of articles. We have blogs, we have forums, let us use those features for socializing as THAT IS THEIR PURPOSE. But leave our talk pages alone as you rob us of more personalization and force yet another useless feature down our thoats. Please stop and consider making this optional before you make a mistake, and slap everyone who has called for making this optional, which is about 95% of the community from what I’ve read, in the face. Making this mandatory when there is so much call for it being made optional, well see my quote above about what that tells us. You know what, perhaps pasting it here again won’t be a bad idea. “We are the gods here and we don't even remotely care what you say. What we say is law and if you don't like it, then we don't care." That is harsh, but it's the truth.