Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-5645428-20170219141610

Hello everyone.

It's been great to see the steady progress in bringing together all the Update 2.1 content. The wiki is as comprehensive as ever! Wikia/Fandom have also been pressing on with their own projects, the latest having been trialling concepts for a new header and navigation bar (will be a while in coming). Discussions has also been continuously updated, and while it has not yet received the crucial notification system we're after, I'm thinking it's time we finally make the shift in light of the details I received regarding an email to Fandom over the features and the transition process.

''Hi Hackey5,

If your community requests to have Discussions enabled, you'll have the chance to try it out and develop a moderation routine before the forums are merged and closed - this could give you an advantage and make the transition smoother.

We're still working on many features that the forums have and that Discussions currently doesn't have (topics, quoting, highlighted threads, text formatting, etc.), but it's not quite decided how many we can finish for Discussions before the merge. You may be aware of why we need to close the forums: They're very time-consuming and complex to maintain, and since they're not very mobile-friendly or searchable, we lose potential user views while they are around. So we can't afford to wait until Discussions is absolutely complete before closing the forums. However, the most important features will be in Discussions before forums are closed, for example on-site notifications and a way to highlight posts for all users. The notifications should be out in a month or two, though I don't want to promise a specific date. The merge will not happen before then.

This is how the merge will happen: All forum content will be copied over, including any posts that you delete until then. The deleted posts will appear deleted in Discussions as well, and you could restore them, if you wanted to. Your boards will be transferred to Discussions categories. It's not clear yet how exactly that will work, but most likely you'll have a new category for each board, and it's then up to your admin team to consolidate and rename those categories as you see fit. In case topics aren't ready by the time the merge happens, you won't need to do anything about those. But the information is stored, so if we release a Discussions equivalent to topics later, all the thread topics that were there before will reappear.

A Discussions-type replacement for Message Walls is still far off, and we have no concrete plans for that yet. And please note: Depending on the amount of forum content you have, the merging process won't take long. It could be as quick as a few minutes, or take several hours, but it won't take longer than that to move everything over. Once it's done, your forums will be closed.

Best, Eva Niroomand, Community Support Manager''

This sounds good to me, and covers my immediate concerns, Of course, do share your thoughts. If we are properly transitioning, it will be highly encouraged to make as much use of Discussions as possible so we can become familiar with its workings as well as identify any issues. In the meantime, a gradual cleanup of the forum will take place that sees much of the 'present moment' content deleted, starting with the oldest content from years ago, primarily under the Level S&R, Custom Icon Creation and Off Topic boards. By the time the complete feature replacement occurs, only the most relevant content will be brought over from the forum to Discussions for viewer convenience.

Discussions will be enabled soon. Once it is, you will certainly be well informed from staff about what's going down. Until then! 