BertH has been kind enough to get back to AYFFR and I on some of our questions about the upcoming Discussions feature. He's also offered to talk to the community on a "local forum thread" AKA here.
Before we start off this talk, make sure you do some reading on the topic so you all know exactly what you're talking about.
AYFFR has been using his own wiki to test out Discussions, and can report a few things on its functionality. Namely:
- Screencaps of the functionality
- It's really laggy. (To the point that it's messing up his copy/paste ability, and crashed Chrome)
- It doesn't support code.
- "The following system is just a little area that shows all the posts you follow instead of a notif."
- "The lack of notifs is a turn off, especially for RPing. Cause if you're on main wiki then you can't check your notifs to see if someone replied to the RP as the RP is located on Discussions"
- "discussions and wiki are essentially two separate sites. So you can't easily link to pages like you can with forums"
- "Even if they were on the same site, you wouldn't even be able to link to pages with code because discussions doesn't support code"
- "You can't do the Italicized posts and stuff, which is something many Rpers use"
- "For us Staff, deleted posts don't go away for us"
- "We can't highlight them"
Some things I've noted from my reading:
- "The newest replies are displayed automatically. On posts with many replies, you may need to click to view the older replies."
- This is not good for a roleplay scenario. We want to be able to see all of the replies at once just by scrolling. We want oldest at the top alongside the original post, and the newest at the bottom next to the add a reply function.
- "Posts and replies can be edited by their author for the first 24 hours after they are created."
- Again, not necessarily good for a roleplay scenario. Replies to the roleplay can be spaced days apart, and sometimes a new reply can make the writer of an old reply realize they made a mistake. If editing is locked after the first 24 hours, they can't fix that, and may create a plot hole because of it.
- "To add a link to a post or reply, type or paste the full URL, even a link to an article page on the same Fandom community. A visual preview of the link destination will appear in the post."
- On the rare occasion that we link something within a thread, we want it integrated smoothly like this. Having a visual preview or forcing the use of the full link instead of embedding it inside of text neatly interrupts the flow of the roleplay.
- "The main Discussions list (labelled 'All') can be ordered by either 'Latest' or 'Trending'"
- The trending thing is entirely irrelevant to our wiki. We usually have a maximum of three active public threads going at any one time. One being the active roleplay part, the next being an announcement or community discussion such as this, and the last being a silly little game.
- "Users receive notifications when: ● a post they are following receives its 1st, 5th, 10th, 25th, 50th and 100th reply. ● a post or reply they created receives 5, 25 or 100 upvotes."
- Roleplayers want a notification with every single reply, and they want it visible from anywhere on the Fandom network. With every new reply we could be required to make our characters do something to keep the story going, and if we don't get the notification right then, we could be stalling the entire roleplay for everyone involved. This is wasting valuable time and patience of the other roleplayers.
- Admin and Moderator Tools
- I will admit. The Administrator and Moderator tools could actually be somewhat of an improvement. However, given the relatively little traffic that goes through here on a daily basis compared to the number of staff members we have, it is entirely overkill for us. For a larger wiki with a lot of traffic, yes, these things would be justified. But when you start dealing with smaller wikis like ours where the admins and mods have probably seen every single edit that's passed by the Wiki Activity, it's unnecessary.
- Activity Feed
- This seems clumsy and over-complicated on both back and front end.
- FAQ: Is wikitext supported?
- The short answer is no, and that's a bit of a problem for us. We use wikitext in multiple ways in roleplays, from using basic <i></i> tags to show thoughts rather than regular speech, to how we set up the start of every single roleplay post: With the {{Roleplay}} template, to showing a different place and time with colored boxes. We use wikitext to keep ourselves organized and clear.
- FAQ: Can we message individual users directly using Discussions?
- The answer to this is... What? I cannot really see a single legitimate use in a community such as this for the @mentions. We all follow the same threads regardless, and would (if we had the kind of notifications we would like to keep) receive a notification with every reply anyways. If the user doesn't reply quick enough for the other's liking, we have chat where we can notify them. In addition to that, @mentions would also disrupt the flow of the roleplay, forcing us to use OOC text where we might otherwise be able to avoid it.
- FAQ: Can my community ask to turn off Discussions if we try it and don't like it?
- This is exactly what we are asking here, and since in there Fandom invites us to discuss with them about it, here we are.
So with that massive wall of points out of the way, let's have a little discussion about Discussions.