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Forums: Helping Hand > Enabling Discussions question

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BadCatMan and I just received a message from FANDOM asking us if we want to enable Discussions, the FANDOM replacement for the Special:Forums (which we do not use on this wiki) for carrying on conversations among fans (who must be logged in to participate). You can read the message here and follow the link to the FANDOM Help page if you wish. My question is, do we want this feature enabled on our wiki?

I think that the FRW, being mostly about the canon of a largely paper-and-web-based fandom, does not need a Discussions feature at this time, but I suspect that time will come. We are not a video gaming wiki, so nobody talks about game play here. We are not a TV wiki, but we got some traffic from fans of Stranger Things when Netflix released season 2 of the show. We are not a movie wiki, but that may change in a year or two if/when the unnamed Dungeons & Dragons movie starts to advertise. Even so, I'm not sure we have to become a movie wiki—perhaps it would be better to have a separate wiki for the movie where people can discuss the actors, performances, catch phrases, lighting, music, plot points, etc., and just link to this wiki when appropriate.

Once this feature is enabled, it cannot be disabled, so there is no way to try it out first. If you have visited other wikis where this feature is enabled, did you use it? What do you think, dear readers and contributors? Will this bring more people to the table? Will it compete with things like the FR reddit? Will it be more trouble that it's worth? I'd like to hear your views.
Moviesign (talk) 22:48, January 10, 2018 (UTC)


Out of curiosity, how does Special:Forums differ from the forum we are using right now?

If we were to switch to the Discussions, would it be possible to convert each one of these posts here on our current forums into a post on the new discussions page?

I don't really have a problem with turning on the discussions, but I don't like forking things.

~ Lhynard (talk) 23:06, January 10, 2018 (UTC)


Special:Forums had a speech-bubble style of replies to posts and the editor allowed some wiki markup (I think). I believe those are nearly gone now, having been migrated to the new Discussions. These old wikiforums will stay as they are, just wiki pages in the Forum namespace. They might be archived (that is, Forum:Index would be turned off), but I've been told we can get it re-enabled by asking.
Moviesign (talk) 23:28, January 10, 2018 (UTC)


TBH, I'm not excited by it. Maybe I'm old-fashioned and don't like change, but I feel our focus is to be an encyclopaedia (well, obviously), to code, write, and organize lore for our favored setting. Our forum discussion should thus be centred around wiki-related work. That doesn't include, or doesn't have to include, general discussion about the setting, news, works, and speculation. There are plenty of forums like EnWorld and Candlekeep for this, there are Facebook groups for this, and they are all much better suited to it. We're here to archive, not to pass judgement, we don't need to be a battleground for Edition Wars or Drizzt criticism.

This is why I've also declined to activate Article Comments, Message Wall, and Chat (though I should recheck for a way to poke anons). This doesn't mean I won't if other editors want one of these.

So, I feel a crude social-media-like chat feature (and it means to imitate social media without being social media, as if it was something to aspire to) seems like a lot of extra work in moderation and conversation for us that doesn't contribute anything to the wiki. A lot of Wikia/FANDOM's features are not actually conducive to good editing and wiki development, like the rubbish Visual Editor. Just because a wiki can do something doesn't mean it should.

On the other hand, I recognise my view might not attract and retain editors and that fostering a community atmosphere might. But I'm not sure that Discussions is right for that. It's slow, narrow, and wonky.
— BadCatMan (talk) 07:08, January 11, 2018 (UTC)


Yet another attempt by Wikia to try to resemble some sort of social networking site. Like their previous efforts (article ratings, comments, blogs, Facebook Connect, non-MonoBook skin, "FANDOM"), I am very unimpressed.
Ir'revrykal (talk) 07:35, January 11, 2018 (UTC)


I remember this same discussion in the Dragon Age wiki. Though, I didn't took a stance there, here is a different story. I don't think we should have to activated that option. As BadCatman said, there are places better suited for that stuff.
Zero (talk) 08:31, January 11, 2018 (UTC)


After reading over the docs on this feature and seeing it in action on other FANDOM wiki's, I dont think we need one here. I agree with others, this wiki isnt a place for general discussion, and our current forum works fine as it is for questions/comments on wiki topics. The Candlekeep forum is a site better suited for general discussion of FR stuff, and maybe we should promote that on the forum page here?
Regis87 (talk) 00:01, January 18, 2018 (UTC)


Sounds like you guys are not interested in enabling discussions at this time. Thanks for having this discussion about it! And Happy Friday!
Jamie (profile)•(talk) 20:26, February 9, 2018 (UTC)
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