Thread:Angelo Gabrini/@comment-28083312-20200620055548/@comment-28083312-20200702030615

In the end it circles back to "what makes discussions better than comments and forums?" I know that you're doing your best to answer my questions and arguments, but in the end you haven't answered this question at all I do apologize, & will try to answer this. I used to be a die-hard Forum fan myself, was originally rejected from Council because I was so, ah, strident in my belief that Forum was far better than Discussions, so I really do understand where you're coming from.

Discussions is superior to these features for largely technical reasons: I apologize for the length, but I wanted to be thorough to hopefully answer your question to the fullest extent possible.
 * 1) We cannot upgrade MediaWiki with Forum & Comments, there is so much tech debt attached to them that it makes the task functionally impossible & prevents us from improving editor tools in a million ways.
 * 2) Forum/Comments are constructed in such a fashion that an internal search tool for them is essentially impossible, whereas it will be possible to add that to Discussions later. I myself, as a technical Admin, have found many, many hacks to these features over the years & many bugs as well, & I have a fairly good idea of just how how these things work (they are essentially a million small Wiki articles that are transcluded into a thread layout, located at @comment locations that are very hard to index, which precludes search).
 * 3) Forum & Comments cannot be made mobile-friendly. We literally had to build a feature from scratch to make it mobile-friendly (Discussions) because Forum/Comments are constructed so rigidly. Given that the people who would use Forum/Comments the most are mobile users, it cannot ever satisfy the main demographic it is supposed to satisfy.
 * 4) *This is the same reason Forum/Comments cannot work in the Fandom App, whereas Discussions can/Discussions-based comments will be able to.
 * 5) Discussions has undergone a lot of development over the years & has more on the way. Used to be a less refined Twitter, & only recently upgraded to less refined Reddit 😛. Fandom is working on a more board-like layout for Discussions that'll be closer to Forum, so hopefully that'll fix that, but most importantly, Discussions has all the markup needed in a social platform, even a social platform where we need to explain complex wiki code to people, due to the preformatted text option. There's still more that's needed, but even angry old me from years ago became mollified at Fandom's new formatting tools in Discussions.
 * 6) Discussions works. I was a Global Discussions Moderator for two years even though I didn't like the feature when I started, & after two-years of seeing one large, happy community after another, I cannot say that Forum does a better job bringing a large group of people together for regular contribution (& I've been on many active Forums). Discussions is the great equalizer, it brings everyone, from desktop to phone, casual to veteran, Admin to user, together in one place.