Thread:Gen. Grievous1138/@comment-25330335-20170202015801/@comment-25330335-20170202235614

"Bert Hall, Feb 2, 2:06 AM UTC: Hi Samwise,

Kirkburn passed your question along to me since I'm working closely with the Discussions team. We are keeping a list of communities who have asked about migrating the Forum content to Discussions as soon as possible, and I can add you to that list if you wish. However, I checked out the intro thread in Discussions and it seems like some of you guys are not exactly thrilled at the moment. It's understandable, I realize things are both different and not as feature-rich right now. We do have on-site notifications coming very soon, and plenty of other features on the way. (MediaWiki signatures won't be supported though.) I see that some users have noted a few things like the reporting function. So my gut feeling is that you may want to wait a bit. We're not going to start the migrations of active forum communities especially soon. There is no timeline at the moment, we are still working on the migration scripts and seeing how different types of content will be handled.

Right now we expect that Forum boards will come over as Discussions categories with no merger into existing Discussions categories that you might have created by then. So they will be additional categories that get added, and then you can choose to merge categories together, or recategorize migrated threads one by one if you see fit. Hopefully that at least helps you plan a little bit.

Let us know if you have any other questions, or if you are still interested in migrating early on in the process.

Best regards,

Bert Hall Director, Support & Engagement"

- Bert Hall

"The overall reaction Discussions has been mostly negative, so for the sake of my community, don't put us on that list. However, since you've taken the time to contact me, I'll take this opportunity to give you as much constructive criticism on the current features as possible, and let you know what we value as a community for this feature.

A lot of what I've seen is that people are disappointed in things that are clearly on your list of priorities for this feature. It's a shame, because I think it has potential, but the lackings that discussions has at it's core should be built onto in other ways. The main one is integration with the wiki the community is based around. Because Discussions is so far separated from the wiki at it's core, the integration that users need should be provided in other ways. 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.

Also, the lack of back-end customization that we have enjoyed with the forums is going to be hard. The little things that make a community special (Like our staff colors) can't be realized in the medium. As one who uses the source editor exclusively, the visual aspect of the editors is also frustrating. A type of markup language support would be incredibly useful and helpful. The visual aspect is helpful for those users who comment occasionally, and who don't have the need to do closely formatted actions. However, as someone who uses the forums a lot, my incredibly minimal use of Discussions' default editor was an experience that I have not yet enjoyed.

A smaller thing is control of categorization. We do a lot of moving around of threads, so a feature that allows for the movement of multiple threads at once would be incredibly helpful. Other small administrative tools like that would be incredibly useful, such as a status tag of some kind.

My personal opinion, and one that I am confident is shared by many using your services, is that the premature removal of forums and a forced move to Discussions would be possibly the worst course of action that could be taken at this point in time. If there is any doubt at all about whether or not a move to discussions at any given point in time would be a good thing, then put it off. The forums are a feature that works for now, and can continue to be made to work for a decent amount of time to come. Waiting until Discussions is mature enough to consider being used as a better alternative to the forums will be incredibly valuable.

I'd like to say that I mean to be helpful, and attempt to accurately convey my needs and moreover the needs of those in my community, which I believe would be fairly similar to those of larger communities outside my sphere of experience. If you have any questions about anything I said here, please feel free to ask me exactly what I have not made clear enough, and I will be more than happy to elaborate.

Thanks for reading, ~Samwise"

- SamwiseFilmore