User blog comment:Cristina7/Introducing Discussions, a New Platform For Engaging Your Community/@comment-24931587-20160909215409

Ugh. As others have already noted, it looks like a Twitter imitator. It looks awful on a desktop and it's inferior to Forums. Even on my smartphone, I find it to be less user-friendly than Forums -- the inclusion of a snippet of each post, plus upvote/reply/share buttons, adds unnecessary bloat to a page which should be a concise list of current discussion topics; one has to scroll twice as much to peruse the list of topics.

The presence of upvote/reply/share buttons in the list-of-discussions is especially abhorrent because it encourages bad behaviour. Only a fool upvotes (likes, agrees) or replies to a post without reading beyond the first sentence. We can't force fools to read the whole message before replying, but that doesn't mean we should make it easier for them to reply without reading.

The lack of wikitext support is a huge problem. On the Xenoblade wiki, we make extensive use of wikitext in the forums when discussing plans for the wiki. We use unordered lists for to-do lists, and nested lists when discussing category hierarchy. We use HTML strikeout tags on to-do items that have been completed. We post internal and external links (sometimes a dozen or more links in one post). We use tables, templates, portable infoboxes, and other snippets of wikitext when discussing proposed changes to article pages.

"The Forum has served Wikia communities well, but it lacks in several areas, including mobile compatibility and visibility on Wikia’s search"

So instead of (1) using CSS to create a mobile-friendly view of forums without negatively affecting the desktop view, and (2) fixing the bugs in Search to make it forum-friendly, Wikia decided to replace it with something that has fewer features and which still required the creation of new CSS code and changes to the Search function to make it work correctly.

"There are some architectural decisions that were part of Forum that prohibit us from easily addressing the biggest issues: inaccessibility from Search and mobile compatibility"

Nonsense. Google has no problem finding something posted in a Wikia forum; the only thing preventing Wikia from making Search work with Forum is that Wikia's devs would rather create something new than fix existing code. And the only serious issue I have with accessing Forums from my smartphone is that Wikia's "mobile" view strips the Forum link from the wiki's navigation menu and strips forum posts from the Wiki Activity page; once I find a way into the forums, it works fine.