Board Thread:Wiki Discussions/@comment-25075055-20140331114355/@comment-25075055-20140407170857

@Umishiru: The chat isn't active most of the time. There are a certain group of users that are in there all the time but treat the place as a dating site. Why? Because most of the sysops don't bother going in there to moderate it. The only sysops I've ever seen in chat are Simant, Ten Tailed Fox and UltimateSupreme and their presence is very very limited most of the time. As a result, the chat goes unregulated, nobody seems to care about doing anything about it and the chat &mdash; as a result &mdash; turns into a totally random discussion area, mainly because several key supporters do not have any intention whatsoever of going into the chat.

With the forums, they're more likely to be used, because there's the "Add a Discussion" bit at the bottom of articles. The only way the forums will get used is if the majority of people behind opening up the forums will actually make the effort to populate the board with discussions.

Another thing is that, with chat, you have to be online at all times and you have to assume someone will come online and answer your question, which many people do not have time to do. With forums, you can post a thread and easily wait until someone responds, as you will be notified when someone responds. :)

Do remember, when the series ends soon, activity will drop. Once the manga has stopped, there will only be a requirement for anime users to stick around, because manga only people won't need to stay around, except to revert vandalism. Having the forums opened up now means that, even with the series ending, there'll still be some form of activity that will keep the place from looking like a ghost town. Another wiki I edited at a few years ago is now fairly dead and gains very little edits, because that series ended and there's nothing to discuss.

Overall, the forums have several benefits over the chat and is much better to moderate, along with the fact we can ask Wikia for a custom flag that creates dedicated forum moderators.