Board Thread:Wiki News/@comment-26339491-20161115185511

For those of you who haven't heard about Discussions at all yet, here's a brief intro: It's Fandom's new conversation feature that will replace the current forums. The forums have many issues (you can't search for posts, neither on the wiki nor via Google, and they're very cumbersome to use on mobile devices, to name two big ones). Discussions is still being built, and it currently lacks some important features that the forums have, but we're working on it. Once it's done, we hope Discussions will work better for you than the forums did. If you have questions now, please check out our Discussions FAQ. Still have questions? Ask me.

The final migration to Discussions will not happen for some time yet. However, since your wiki has a particularly high number of mobile users (largely due to your popular community app), we'll be enabling Discussions two weeks from now.

Why?
One of the reasons why we want to introduce Discussions is that it will allow a completely new group of users to discover your community and become involved. So far, app users can't comment on your content and can't contribute at all. With Discussions right there in the app, they'll be able to. Posting and editing from a mobile browser is possible, but it's very cumbersome, and so hardly anyone does it.

You already have a large number of app users reading your content. With Discussions, they can finally participate in the community, too! They might even become article editors - we've seen this happen on other communities with Discussions. Fandom community apps are all cross-promoted within one another, and have a user base of tens of thousands. This group of users is generally separate from the crowd that discovers wikis via Google; they are people discovering your community for the first time. That means there's a lot of potential for your community to grow once Discussions makes it accessible for all these Angry Birds fans.

It'll still be a while until the forums are closed and migrated to Discussions, but it'll likely take time until everyone's got used to Discussions. That's why we want to enable it early, before the forums will be migrated. You can give it a try now, develop a moderation routine, and tell us what is and isn't working for you, so we can address it in time. That way, the final migration should go without a hitch.

What can you do?
Please think about how you'd like to customize and set up Discussions. It's different from the forums in organization and style, so feel free to check out other communities where Discussions has been around for a while already to get an idea. For example, there's Fallout, Overwatch, Elder Scrolls, and many others. Your admins can upload an avatar image and header, set categories, and adjust the Discussions guidelines to this wiki's policies.

Since Discussions may very well become more active than the current forum (this is what happened on pretty much every community with an app that received Discussions), please consider who might be interested in moderating Discussions, and how. The more guidance new users receive from you experienced editors, the more valuable Discussions will become as an extension of the community.

I know this was long - thanks for reading! 