Thread:Gen. Grievous1138/@comment-25330335-20170202015801/@comment-25330335-20170208001615

Just got this:

"Bert Hall, Feb 7, 6:51 PM UTC: Hi Samwise,

Thanks for this outstanding feedback. Indeed, the separation of Discussions from the rest of the wiki has made things interesting. I do believe it's the right choice. In addition to being part of our more modern "service-oriented architecture" approach (ref: http://community.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:DaNASCAT/Introducing_Service-Oriented_Architecture,_A_New_Approach_to_Software_Development) I should note that the presence of Forum, Message Wall and Comments in the activity feeds (RecentChanges and WikiActivity) was often a problem for some communities who wished they were more separate. So here we unfortunately please some while making others unhappy, which is a difficult position sometimes. But the connections can be (re)built in many ways. Already there is a user-made script for creating a RecentChanges-like feed for Discussions: http://dev.wikia.com/wiki/DiscussionsFeed

We will also be adding on-site Notifications for Discussions very soon, and changing the email notification behavior to be more like how watchlist emails work.

Ideally, this would be a re-work of the page comments system, so that notifications become a part of that, so that discussions about specific content are much easier to maintain. This is also an area we will be exploring. Both with "tags" on Discussions to tie a discussion to specific articles (very much like "topics" in the Forum) as well as updates to the Comments system.

We'll be adding a more robust editor with markup options, though the extent of wikitext support is still to be determined. It's unlikely that the wiki CSS/JS customizations will be expanded to Discussions anytime soon, since the Discussions pages do not use the same core files. But as the desktop layout evolves we would like to introduce more customization options. We would love to know more about what you'd like to see. I am sure you've noticed that Admins and Mods have an avatar badge in Discussions, which (IMHO) is a nice addition that we never brought to Forum/Wall and does accomplish some of what the "staff colors" do.

We've had some other requests around bulk actions for mods/admins -- recategorization and other things.

Other small administrative tools like that would be incredibly useful, such as a status tag of some kind. Can you tell me what you mean by "status tag"?

While Discussions will eventually replace Forum, there is no timeline for starting the migration of content yet, and Discussions does indeed have more evolution in store! I hope you'll keep sending feedback as you see the feature evolve, even if you don't use it too much on your community right now.

Thanks again,

Bert Hall Director, Support & Engagement"

- Bert Hall