Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-3279282-20171010145040/@comment-1251315-20171011193002

When those two forum boards were made, the intention was for them to be heavily moderated and controlled. However, quite evidently, when the boards were made, nobody actually took the time to moderate them from the start, thus they were allowed to fester for many months into a cesspool. Even when I became a forum op, it was largely impossible to do anything about the cesspool without upsetting users with any kind of moderative action.

The problem is that you can't "delete" all the threads in one go just by removing the forum board, the topics have to exist and would end up merged with another board, thus they're still going to be on the wiki (the only way to "hide" them would be to disable the forums, which would mean removing every other discussion that doesn't come under the topic of this thread). Yes they may not be overly great contributions, but they're still a form of contribution, even if they're not the contribution some users seem to be expecting. No doubt, if these forums are moved to discussions, this would happen again anyway because "Discussions" are literally just meant for use by fans and there's zero way to disable that functionality at all.

Unfortunately, Wikia has gone away from the idea of "just pure wiki's" to largely communities with many of their features in the last year or so. I have noticed that the main wiki section largely appears to be inactive, barring a small number of editors reverting vandalism, uploading new episode pics and writing the episode summaries. The forums still seem to be the more active, even if marginally, and I don't think much good can come from just wiping off the section just because a few editors have a compulsive hatred of discussions as a whole (they may not be good, but nobody forces you to post in them anyway: if you do).

I do think a rule about "no shitposting or low effort discussions" may be a good way of trying to bring some quality to the forums, but I don't believe "outright deletion" is the way to go without annoying a lot of users and making the wiki more dead than it is. IMO, efforts should be made to encourage users to stay, that was partially the reasons behind opening up the forums, but maybe in the long run it didn't help, because of how the forums started in the short term.

Of course, these are just my thoughts and no doubt some will rubbish my opinions because they don't personally like me, but that's fine. :)