I don't really remember Forum Index, but it seems like the only option. There's no way to organize discussions right now if I'm not mistaken; every wiki I've visited that has discussions doesn't have anyway to search or categorize discussions besides date and popularity.

So either Forum Index would be pretty much required if any actualy important matter of the wiki needed to be discussed.

Either that or we can set up a discord, as some other wikis have done. But that seems like a lot of work, so I support bringing back Forum Index.

I don't think Discord has an elegant way of preserving discussions for the long term, complicating its use as a reference of past discussions months or years after the fact. It also wouldn't solve the problem Discussions has of needing to check two places if a person wants to contribute to one wiki.

Yeah, that's true. Discord wouldn't be good for keeping records. It is easy communication though.

Discord wouldn't solve every problem, but it'd be easier to communicate as well as ping specific people when we need them.

In any case, I agree though. Discord probably isn't the answer, it's just a possibility I tossed out. I've never used Forum Index, how does it compare to the Forums we have now? And would it solve most of the issues we'll be having with Discussions?

re Discord, that's simply not true. Discord saves chat history forever (assuming people don't delete their messages) and it can be referenced without issue, either via searching for the post or making note of message links and sharing them to people, which will take them to the relevant chat.

If making a record of stuff was needed, you can just make a channel in a discord server with "consensus-records" and link to the relevant message that started the discussion, or a more simpler/automated solution would be using a bot which had a command to "close" a discussion: invoking this would clean out the chat and archive it to a text file that is then uploaded to a channel (or a website with a link given) that acts as a record of the said discussion.

A discord server is pretty popular with a lot of communities and they're significantly easier to moderate and use than even existing forums imo. I probably wouldn't be welcome in such a discord server though, given my history, but just clearing up misconceptions about the platform as someone who has used it for a few years now.

@Squinty97: old forums were really just wiki pages in a different namespace with set templates made for navigation. Nothing fancy about them at all and not likely to be very useful in consensus discussions (although given the wiki has so few active editors anyway, it's probably not that much of a concern as it used to be back in the day)