Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-1207741-20200110084333

As has been mentioned in another topic, Wikia pushed back the migration of the forums to its Discussions software. Currently it's been pushed back to April, though I suppose it could be pushed back again?

Anyway, Discussions has various shortcomings. Discussions posts don't show up in Special:Recentchanges, meaning users won't know what's going on in Discussions unless they visit Discussions. Discussions also uses an endless scroll layout, which makes it almost impossible to find topics that are older than a few weeks. Wikia claims that it's aware of shortcomings like these and that it will address them eventually.

One issue that Wikia will not be addressing is the fact that Discussions cannot use its companion wiki's templates, or in fact any sort of wikitext. This is because, although Discussions and its accompanying wiki are connected, they are fundamentally different. Therefore, if ever a wiki would like to have a discussion about the wiki's templates or wikitext, it cannot use Discussions. For those wikis that would want a place to discuss such wiki-centric material, Wikia recommends using Forum:Index as an alternative.

The Naruto wiki's Forum:Index was disabled back when Special:Forum was implemented. If it would like to start using it again, it would need to be re-enabled with Special:Contact.

The purpose of this topic is twofold:
 * 1) Does the wiki want to re-enable the Forum:Index?
 * 2) If the wiki does want to start using Forum:Index again, what does it want to use it for?

With regards to the second question, I'll reiterate the two shortcomings of Discussions I mentioned before: Discussions doesn't show up in Special:Recentchanges, making it entirely possible for editors of the wiki to have no idea what is being talked about in Discussions; Discussions is cumbersome to search, making it difficult to reference past discussions and any consensus that may have been reached. The forums have been used for discussing wiki-wide topics quite often (Thread:269574, Thread:273274, and Thread:275105 as examples), so these are rather irritating shortcomings.

Because of these shortcomings, I think it would be best to use Forum:Index for discussing the wiki (wiki-wide style guidelines, article organization and formatting, coordination for upcoming content edits, etc.) and let Discussions be used for discussing the series (versus threads, fan theories, chapter/episode reviews, etc.)

Please leave thoughts below. There's no urgency, since the wiki has until at least April to reach a decision. 