Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-1824272-20200813174338/@comment-1824272-20200814180752

Spike144 wrote:

It looks odd that a project based on mediawiki replaces forums based on mediawiki with these discussions. The absence of working abusefilter is an even worse problem, as it opens the wiki to vandals.

On the other hand, I see no benefits. What are the actual benefits of the discussions? I saw some info on Community Central but it looked like an advertisement where sellers praise their goods that nobody needs, so a lot of shiny words but no actual technical specifications. I expect somebody had to pay a team of developers to create the discussions, and these developers had to have instructions what they should create. The part that is more complicated and led to all of this was what you said at the start: "forums based on mediawiki". To start with, these Forums we're talking on right now aren't from the Wikimedia Foundation; this was a custom-built modification to our specific port of the MediaWiki software. It was developed and designed around 2011, I believe. That, however, leads to the problems:
 * 1) Forums is not currently mobile-friendly. You need to use the desktop version of the site to use them, and it would cost us a lot of effort and time to make Forums mobile-friendly.
 * 2) Forums is not compatible with newer versions of MediaWiki, since it was designed from the beginning for our custom MediaWiki 1.19. It was so specifically designed that any MediaWiki upgrade would require a lengthy development process.

These issues led to the decision to create a new product. Discussions was designed from the beginning to support both desktop and mobile and, since it's not built on MediaWiki, it will not prevent future updates to the MediaWiki software and the editing experience.