Forum:New "Discussions" Feature

Hello One Piece Wiki. Wikia posted a blog about a new way to interact with the community and they revealed a new feature called "Discussions" (read about it here.) Are we going to transition to the new feature or stay at our present state? Just wanted to start a discussion about it Meshack (talk) 00:53, September 9, 2016 (UTC)

I've looked into it before, but I don't it's something the wiki needs right now. Sticking to what we have is good. It's very new and there's bound to be bugs and other issues surrounding it. Right now http://youtube.wikia.com/d/f?sort=trending is one of the only wikis using it and as you can see it's not too popular 01:03, September 9, 2016 (UTC)

I know the Naruto Wiki is about to transition Meshack (talk) 01:39, September 9, 2016 (UTC)

Yes, but we're not the Naruto Wiki.

At any rate, I'm 100% against the new feature. It looks terrible, ugly on desktops, and from the comments, miss a lot of features you can do on the forums and have a lot of bugs. No thanks. 02:29, September 9, 2016 (UTC)

^What Jade said. Also if you take a closer a lot of users from there aren't too happy about the forced transition. 02:31, September 9, 2016 (UTC)

We don't need it anyway since we can just click on something and then start a discussion easily. SeaTerror (talk) 02:33, September 9, 2016 (UTC)

I didn't say we should do it because the Naruto Wiki was. I was just stating they were doing it. Meshack (talk) 03:45, September 9, 2016 (UTC)

Yep, screw this new Discussion crap. Let's stave it off as long as possible.--Xilinoc (talk) 06:12, September 9, 2016 (UTC)

^ Let's start a new wiki and link to it and then if anybody removes the links get mad and then don't come back if the wiki dies. SeaTerror (talk) 06:22, September 9, 2016 (UTC)

I think there is a big misunderstanding on this: this wiki does not have the "new forum" active (what we are using is the so-called wiki-style forum which won't be affected in any way by discussions ever) therefore is not really affected by it (although I do not understand if Discussions will be eventually active by default on every wiki or just replace the new forums. I'll investigate). That said, I think this community will greatly benefit from discussions since we have a dedicated app and a very large fan base. And by this I mean we can clearly separate the "wiki aspect" from the "fandom aspect", meaning let's leave all the "fan-related things" to discussions and blogs and use the forum for community discussions and the wiki community. By the way, Discussions does not appear in RecentChanges (which I think is both a plus and a con), so if we leave the fan-discussions to that feature (and blogs) it translates in less crap in RC and maybe more new users.

Contacted Staff today via email and here's there response to me about it:

''Right now, it's optional to try out Discussions. You can request to have them enabled for your community, but if you don't, you won't see Discussions there. However, our eventual goal is to replace the current forums with Discussions (all content will be copied over, so you won't lose any existing forum threads). That won't be optional. The reason for this is that the forums have several shortcomings that would be very difficult for us to fix - most notably the fact that they don't work well on most mobile devices, and half of all Wikia users are on mobile. We've developed Discussions - and are still heavily expanding on it with more features - to offer a replacement for the forums that will hopefully work for more users and give each wiki a better communication space. At the moment, Discussions is still missing several important features that the forums have, so it's not quite ready to replace them - but we'll get there. I see your community doesn't use Wikia's forums, so you'd lose or risk absolutely nothing if you tried Discussions. On the contrary, since your community also has an app, and many mobile visitors discover your content there, you might gain lots of new community members (and article editors) that way.'' 21:47, September 9, 2016 (UTC)

My point exactly.

Well, might as well try to see how it goes, if we don't necessarily have to use it. It's not like it could be bothersome either, from what I've heard from the posts above. 22:13, September 9, 2016 (UTC)

Or we can just enable it on our unofficial test wiki and play around with it. And if we happen to like what is has to offer enable it here ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 22:26, September 9, 2016 (UTC)

Nobody cares about mobile users anyway. SeaTerror (talk) 23:27, September 9, 2016 (UTC)

We don't need it. 11:27, September 10, 2016 (UTC)

"Nobody cares about mobile users anyway." - 50% of the viewers on wikia use mobile and the app has between 500.000 and 1.000.000 installations. I don't think there is any point in turning that on on the test wiki since there is no userbase there. Just try it here for some months and see what happens. It doesn't show up in RC so you literally won't notice it. Most of the comments on the announcement blog are pissed off because they don't want to give up the new forum which we don't have (and it's hilarious IMO because the new forum was literally hated when it was first announced).


 * or we could also wait some months before trying it so it will be more developed and widespread. Let's say when it will have completely substitute the wikia forum.

Levi has a good idea there. There's no harm in delaying our decision on this until they get the feature working properly.

12:06, September 10, 2016 (UTC)

I think there is no harm in trying it since it's literally doesn't change anything for us. However, maybe it's a good idea to try it once it completely substitute the wikia forum because when that happens more users will be aware of that function and will be already used to it, not to mention it will also probably be more developed.

Sure, let's do that then. 12:37, September 10, 2016 (UTC)