No wikitext means there is no source edit mode.
It's a little awkward which really makes me wonder why the forums are going, but thank you for answering.
The God Of Procrastination wrote:
which really makes me wonder why the forums are going
Because MediaWiki wasn't meant to create something like forums, it had a lot of issues under the hood and it had limited portability. Fixing it would cost more resources than it was worth, so it was no longer viable. Yeah, it's annoying that wikitext is not supported, but it has tags and limited WordPress-style markup, which can get a lot done. The main hiccup is wiki technical questions; if we're ever getting some sort of wikitext compatability, I would expect it to be probably in a box or something, like <pre> or <code> tags.
Probably 9/10 discussions can be perfectly fine without any wikitext.
No, they've mentioned they won't do that. It brings with it negativity and with it, can sour the atmosphere.
By "issues under the hood," do you mean things like how getting a permission error with image uploads stops you from searching for them?
"Under the hood" could refer to any number of things from the specifics of how the code was written to deliberate decisions that make it incompatible with newer versions. Sometimes, the phrase can be used to mean not necessarily a technical limitation but an inherent inefficiency. That certainly seems to be the case, at least in part, with Forum. Forum, along with all other threaded discussion methods (article comments, blog comments, and message walls) store content in a manner which is viewed as inefficient and cumbersome to work with. On top of that, the features are not compatible with mobile devices.
Discussions vs. Forum has been discussed for quite some time; ever since Discussions was released. If you want to know more, the latest thread can be found here.
FYI, the thread mentioned above is closed, so you can't reply anymore. Also, there are a few (very few) alternatives (Extension:StructuredDiscussions is one) on MediaWiki to the soon to be killed forum that do still support wikitext, but they were never discussed.
To clarify, Wikia has not announced any intentions to enable any of those alternatives.
Which is why I said "...they were never discussed."
It's possible something might be considered after the UCP rollout, but that is still quite far off, so who knows.