Board Thread:Community Announcements and Events/@comment-25356303-20160514210029/@comment-25356303-20161231034630

Razorgirl wrote: Can someone please explain to me the value of why we'd want Discussions seperate from the Forum?

Discussions is less frustrating to work with now than it was in May, but a lot of issues still persist with the platform. We've been cracking down on post quality and whatnot in the past few months, and the community seems to have matured a lot, so at this point we're more concerned with the lack of moderation features on Discussions.

Even after more than a year since Discussions' creation, it is still very plain when it comes to features. There is no wikitext, no quoting, no multi-level comment sections, no stickies/highlights, no post editing history, no built-in logs (Flightmare had to build his own), a ridiculously low cap on the number of boards, limiting following/notification options, limited user access to the rules, a very clumsy method of handling reported posts, no "reason for reporting/locking/deleting" option when doing those things, overall terrible desktop support, and a plethora of other things. It's just a really bad platform and has been since the beginning.

On the other hand, a major issue with the Forums is its lack of proper mobile support; this is obviously something that Discussions fixes. Once Discussions is polished up (this will take a while), things will be fine. Wikia has assured us that we will be one of the last wikis to see its Discussions and Forums merged, and I doubt they will rush the merge forward without implementing many of the aforementioned features.

Earlier this year, we were under the impression that the merge was going to happen a lot sooner than it actually was (my estimate at this point is Q4 2017); replacing the Forums with the Discussions at that point would have ruined a large part of the wiki. Considering the fact that the merge isn't happening for a long time, most of us are grudgingly satisfied with the direction it's going in. Regardless, it's not like we ultimately have a decision in the matter; Wikia will be merging them whether we like it or not.