Board Thread:Community Announcements and Events/@comment-5275700-20160314184502/@comment-26213507-20160318004539

BertH wrote: I’d like to highlight a few specific comments and ask for more details, to help us understand the root of the concerns.

“If forums were eliminated, a decent amount of our fan base would disappear” First, I'll start with saying that I should have pointed out that the biggest impact would be the forums. Since implementation, the forums have been extremely active. In addition, also since implementation, discussions were very active. One thing is for certain: besides staff, the users using both are nothing alike. In addition to the obvious that there is more formality in forums, in discussions, it was shown a huge amount more were immature, and when staff began to intervene, it was met with huge backlash almost out of nowhere. Whenever someone is immature on the forums, they stop much easier. Why? Because no one else is immature on the forums. Maybe this was because the forums evolved over the years, but one thing is for certain, a merge would be a step backwards. We wanted the app users to have a way to discuss, but we didn't intend on the cutting off of other users.

I'll elaborate on the users a bit more. As I mentioned above, the users are different. If you took both communities and mashed them together, it would be, as Shawn mentioned, catastrophic. The discussion users will chase away forum people with their general nonsense. I should have specified more that the users of the forums would mostly be affected, as they would lose interest in the forums with the sudden shift in attitude. In addition, with the middle ground you mentioned BertH, a decent amount of discussion users would also get annoyed at the increase in formality and will lose interest. They are less of a problem than the forum users due to their worse attitude. That's what I meant by my statement: that the merge will cause people to abandon both features.