We will retire forum highlights soon | Fandom

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Mira Laime·11/29/2018 in General

We will retire forum highlights soon

This year, we released Announcements, a new tool for admins and moderators to notify their community members about important news.

Since they are now no longer needed for this purpose, we will be retiring Forum highlights. Our target date for this is mid-December.

That means, admins will no longer have the ability to highlight a forum thread to generate notifications to everyone who is visiting their community. Highlights that are already active will continue to be displayed until their default display time of one week is over.

What’s different about Announcements

Announcements can be created by Discussions moderators as well as admins.
An announcement notification can link not just to a Discussions thread, but to any type of content on the wiki - article pages, blog posts, message walls, etc.
Announcements generate notifications that all recently active community members will see regardless of where they are on FANDOM.
Announcement expire after 30 days unless they are manually expired sooner.
Only one announcement can be active per community at any one time.

You can find more details about Announcements on the Announcements help page.

What if I have more than one thing about which I want to notify my community?

If you have multiple things you’d like your community to notice, we recommend creating a blog or article page where you list what is currently noteworthy on the wiki. You can create a new announcement whenever a new item is added.

That way, your users will get notified without being flooded with multiple announcement notifications from all their communities.

(Edited by Mira Laime)

1

Ittyyy·12/17/2018

Can I find out where they decided why they want to make such a big, random change? I am curious to hear their reasoning. And why not just keep both of them?

(Edited by Ittyyy)

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Andrewds1021·12/17/2018

Done.

(Edited by Andrewds1021)

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Annabeth and Percy·12/18/2018

Fandyllic wrote:

Tupka217 wrote:
For interaction and consultation with users, there's the Community Council.

The Community Council would be better if users could vote someone in... right now it has the danger of being a yes-man group, since FANDOM staff appoints them.

The same could also be said about the moderators chosen here on Community Central. But as someone who is a part of Council, I can tell you, that is often not the case. But at least, most of the time, we can have civil discussions.

(Edited by Annabeth and Percy)

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Cheetos8089·12/18/2018

FANDOM, just stop already. Nobody likes the whole discussions feature to begin with. You're making the website worse, not better. Nobody likes discussions. Forums are easier and we're all used to them. A lot of people will quit FANDOM because of this.

(Edited by Cheetos8089)

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Tupka217·12/18/2018

Cheetos8089 wrote: FANDOM, just stop already. Nobody likes the whole discussions feature to begin with. You're making the website worse, not better. Nobody likes discussions. Forums are easier and we're all used to them. A lot of people will quit FANDOM because of this.

That's how you experience it. But it's not true. Forums are a mess behind the curtain.

(Edited by Tupka217)

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Golfpecks256·12/18/2018

Cheetos8089 wrote: FANDOM, just stop already. Nobody likes the whole discussions feature to begin with. You're making the website worse, not better. Nobody likes discussions. Forums are easier and we're all used to them. A lot of people will quit FANDOM because of this.

The technical side of this takes a major role in changes like this. Discussions aren't even fully developed yet you're drawing a conclusion so quickly.

(Edited by Golfpecks256)

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Tupka217·12/18/2018

I know plenty of people that like Discussions over Forums, because they work better on mobile. It's brought in a lot of good new users for us. Discussions and forums are just as easy; in many ways easier because new users don't have to understand wikitext to participate, and the wiki doesn't have to delete the images people add.

(Edited by Tupka217)

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TeMePeCe·12/18/2018

Fandom is obviously taking the same bet as tumblr.

(Edited by TeMePeCe)

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Fandyllic·12/18/2018

Tupka217 wrote:
I know plenty of people that like Discussions over Forums, because they work better on mobile. It's brought in a lot of good new users for us. Discussions and forums are just as easy; in many ways easier because new users don't have to understand wikitext to participate, and the wiki doesn't have to delete the images people add.

While most of this is true for the wikis I work on, you don't need to know wikitext to use the thread-based Forum. Having images not show up in the wiki store is also a drawback because you can't look for bad images in a central place.

I don't think Discussions will ever support wikitext and any hints by FANDOM that this will happen are probably just PR. So, I'll probably reduce the amount of help I give when Forum goes away as I also think there won't be a suitable replacement for Forum maybe ever.

(Edited by Fandyllic)

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Mira Laime·12/18/2018

Closing this thread once more since it has veered off-topic. The constructive feedback users have posted here has been noted and the common points identified.

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions or shared their own experience with Highlights or Announcements!

(Edited by Mira Laime)