Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-32617252-20180617235347/@comment-4271790-20180621002642

Seelentau wrote: I still hold the opinion that at least the VS board should be closed for good. This website is first and foremost an encyclopaedia, the forums are just an extra. Hence why I don't moderate them - they're simply not part of my job. I can't speak for the other mods and sysops, but if they're all fine with this going on as it does, then so be it. Especially considering that ideas for changes to the wiki incited by me are prone to willful misunderstandings by some. So there's nothing else I have to say about this.

Edit: And yes, technically, there's no "staff", we're not hired or anything. But you guys know what I mean^^ I also agree. In my experience, versus/strength/power level debates can be one of the single most toxic and damaging things to an online community. One of the most obvious examples of this being issues on sites documenting or discussing a fictional series is Dragon Ball. Whether it be from subpar sources of information on DB like the Dragon Ball Wiki to renown sources of information on DB like Kanzenshuu, versus/strength debates tend to attract and proliferate the amount of toxic users from the Internet in their forums as well. Hell, even on the DBZ Reddit, they've outlawed these types of debates in their rules section and redirect users to the "Who Would Win" Reddit.

Now, that's just Dragon Ball. The reason I bring this up is because the wiki could do something similar as others have already suggested. The VS debates board specifically, from what I've seen, has been the main impetus behind the pandemonium that often occurs in the forums, whether it be low effort threads (there was a thread that addressed this), personal insults (there was even an incident when the insults bled onto user talkpages), etc. In addition, the wiki keeps ending up in this cycle: "forums are out of control" -> "someone makes a thread about it" -> "what is done in said thread to placate the chaos doesn't work" -> "forums are out of control". Appointing new moderators over the forums (or having "stricter moderation" and such) are also trapped in this cycle, because they're all real people that get busy as life moves on... which totally makes sense. Moderation isn't a job or career and it's completely thankless. And then we're back to the "forums are out of control" stage. That's not to imply getting more mods would be completely pointless, however. But things like fanfiction and/or pairing/shipping discussions are banned from this wiki for the same reason: they get out of control. In my opinion, given the ongoing situation, it might be best to just close the VS board and point users elsewhere as others have suggested.

However, I'd like to make it a point that once the "Discussions" feature becomes a thing on this wiki, there's no way to disable it or anything. With it being moved off of the wiki namespace, these problems we've been having with the forums would just resurface there, and perhaps become even worse. Which again brings up the solution "get more mods", but as Tau and I have mentioned, who exactly is competent enough, willing, and has enough time to partake in more moderation? It's like Wikia/Fandom wants to maximize our problems with these new features they've kept adding over the years. But I don't think the "Discussions" feature will be implemented all that soon here anyway, so it doesn't hurt to find solutions to the issue in the forums in the meantime. Nevertheless, eventually it'll just be "discussions are out of control" added to this never-ending cycle.