Extremely important information about the future of our forums (Staff only)

Hello.

I have some extremely serious news regarding the future of our forums.

As you may or may not know, Fandom had previously told us that the move to Discussions would happen first a few years down the line, after all the functions of the old forum had been properly replicated.

A few days ago (In connection with Friday the 13th. Make of that what you will) I was told that this is no longer the case (likely due to recent decisions from executives of higher positions within the company than themselves), and that the move will likely happen near the end of this year, or maybe a little later, with the message walls being replaced with something similar to the new system some unknown time later, and that we need to prepare accordingly.

Basically, the different needs of this community were eventually not considered to be of sufficient value to give us special consideration compared to Fandom as a whole, which does not use the forums nearly as much as we do. I have been told that the entire point of replacing the forums is a pressing need to get rid of the code, which is a business decision.

After recovering from the shock I have investigated all of the practical consequences of this, including by talking with a Fandom staff member, personal tests of the Discussions functionality, and thinking of potential solutions.

The problems
Here are the practical problems with this that I have discovered, along with some general information:

Discussions only display the latest 10 replies in a thread. We constantly have to click a button to show more, so if we, for example, have a 450 post long discussion, we will have to click 44 times to get a coherent overview of all of it.



In addition, they supposedly do not ever automatically close without staff doing so manually (for the forums a thread automatically closes at 500 posts), so what I mentioned above could potentially turn into an even greater problem.

The discussion threads are not possible to open in several browser tabs at once. Rather, you constantly have to hit the back button after ever single thread visit, which automatically scrolls back to a much earlier point in your forum overview. As such it is very difficult to efficiently coordinate contributions to several important new threads.

I have been told that the Fandom technical team is aware of the above problems, and that they might be fixed later (although we are probably talking about a quite long timespan after the switch in that case), but that it is also likely that the team won't do so, and that we definitely shouldn't count on it.

Other major problems are that we apparently receive notifications from both upvotes and possibly every new reply to Discussions threads that we are subscribed to, and that the ones you have checked out (and possibly replied to) do not disappear from the list afterwards.

Here is what it looks like for just a few replies in a single subscribed thread. Now imagine how hard it would be to get a proper overview if you are subscribed to hundreds or thousands of them, with 100-200 replies each on average.




It does not appear to be possible to update the "topics" (meaning the connected character and verse pages currently seen at the bottom of a discussion) after a thread has already been created, or at least I haven't noticed how to do so.

It is not possible to overview new changes to the Discussions threads via the recent changes page.

There does not appear to be any decent search function that allows us to find and reference older discussions. I have been told that a better search function for the wiki as a whole, including Discussions, may be under development, but this will likely take a considerable period of time.

We are constantly swarmed with very inexperienced newbie mobile users who have posted thousands of "who will win" polls that would make it much harder to browse for more serious discussions.

I have been informed that our slur filter will still work for Discussions.

The Discussions module isn't optimised for Firefox, but you can technically use Chrome or Opera instead. The above-mentioned problems will still remain though.

An older version of the forums will still remain, and was suggested to me as an alternative, as it does show up in recent changes, but, unlike Discussions, it does not give automatic notifications for new replies, only e-mail messages, and activating that option in your personal user settings would also mean new messages any time any profile page that you have ever edited is updated, meaning several hundred of them every day for myself, and still far too many for the most active other members, so it does not seem like a better solution on its lonesome.

Here are instructions for how to set it up in any case (It will become relevant further down in this post):

https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Help:Wiki-style_forums

Another potential problem with Discussions is that I think that any Administrator or Discussion Moderator can technically remove all of the posts of another member, that they have ever posted in their entire time in the wiki, but not the reverse. Similarly to the WHAM and Nuke scripts, this should always be treated like a loaded nuclear weapon, and never ever be used against other members unless they are very blatant spam trolls. Once removed, it seems like the posts have to be restored manually one by one, which would take ages to handle.

It seems like we can approach the Fandom staff to take care of mass-restoring posts in a crisis situation though.

The Fandom technical team will transfer all of our old Forum posts to the corresponding Discussions sub-forums, but they may not be able to transfer our subscriptions to them, as it could be too complicated. Given the notification problem that I mentioned above, and the solution that I will suggest below, it might be a good idea to request that they do not though.

The solutio
A new forum outside of the wiki.

I have talked with a friend of mine who is an entrepeneur, and he is willing to long-term pay for and help us set up a page that can host the forum for the wiki, but needs our help with most of the practical work.

He suggested Discourse, but did not know if it is the best for our purposes, and will ask a well-informed friend of his for input after I sent him a list of our requirements. He suggested that I should engage the community to ask for help with information and suggestions regarding this.

What is preferably required:

• The forum needs a stable service provider with a good reputation, so it has decent stability and technical support, isn't just shut down one day, is easy to handle, and has good security/protection. It should preferably also be easy to continuously upgrade to new and better versions of the system.

• It should be possible to give the staff members specific username colours and a tag to inform people about their positions in the wiki.

• The forum preferably needs to give automatic notifications for new updates/responses to subscribed discussion threads, similarly to our current forum.

• It probably needs Cloudflare protection against DDOS attacks, given the trolls and other people who hate us, but this must likely be added externally.

• To avoid that the trolls snatch our usernames, the forum initially needs to only be possibly to use via single use invitation/registration links to members of the wiki, but all visitors should still be able to read what we write. We can use the wiki chat in private mode for this purpose. The staff should preferably be invited first by myself, after which the ones with administrator positions can help out by giving invitation links to all of the regular members one-by-one via the private wiki chat.

• It needs personal customisation for layout, so our members can select if a subscribed discussion thread should show 100 or 200 messages per page for example.

• Image uploads should preferably be restricted, both due to potential copyright claims and to save storage space/running costs. The members should instead upload images to the wiki and link to them.

• It should be possible to decide titles for enough sub-forums that we need.

• There should be good search function options in the forum, preferably with the ability to select specific "topics" for different subjects, to provide an easy overview, such as Naruto or Dragon Ball.

• It should preferably be possible to activate a decent slur word filter, so none of our members are banned from the wiki by the Fandom staff at some point, as they will likely consider an official wiki as bound by their internal rules of conduct.

• It should also be possible to highlight specific important discussion threads that need community attention.

Good suggestions based on these requirements are extremely appreciated.


Some additional information:

It is possible to save the contents of the previous forum via the inbuilt Export page, but then it would have to be done one thread at a time, and possibly the Datadump page, to do so en masse, but it would likely be very technically difficult to successfully transfer all of the information to the external forum. For what it is worth, it uses MediaWiki code, if that is of any help.

We can also activate the wiki-style forums as an extra alternative for informing new members about our new main official forum outside of the wiki.

In addition, I would update the community messages, the front page of the wiki, and the Discussions rules, to automatically inform most new members about the new external forum address.

I also ask all members to please not either panic or quit the wiki in frustration over this. I know that changing to a new external forum, and having to request to sign up there is not nearly as convenient as a well-functioning internal forum, and that this will likely set back much of our content revision work by a few months, but we still need to support each other and try our best to make it work. The alternative is that we won't have a functional way to communicate with each other at all, which means that the wiki will quickly fall into complete chaos and turn into a far more unreliable and unfixable mess than it is currently. Given that I have spent around 20000 hours for the last 5 years trying to keep this community reasonably organised, and gradually improve on its structure and reliability, I definitely don't want to throw it all away and give up. I am likely even going to have to postpone my yearly vacation because of this.

As such, I would greatly appreciate if we all help each other out to prepare for this change, and diminish the potential damage as much as possible. Constructive suggestions are very appreciated. Both I and this community genuinely need all of your help to manage to endure and handle all of these upcoming problems.

Also, I am very well aware that I should have been able to foresee this problem at a much earlier point. I have been so continuously overworked that I didn't consider this possibility for quite some time after receiving the above-mentioned assurances from the Fandom staff, and am already beating myself up a lot internally over it, but I think that we can all make this work if we make a genuine effort to help each other out and hurry up, as we only have around 3 months to set up and prepare the new forum. Maybe a little more, but we cannot count on it.

As an effect of having to dedicate extra time for this when I am already extremely overworked, I will also have to make an effort to severely diminish my engagement in new discussions and revisions in the current forum, unless they are very important. As such, the wiki could turn more disorganised and inefficient for a while. My apologies. I will try to help finish up the ongoing discussion threads that I am already subscribed to though.

In order to diminish the resulting chaos of this thread it is intended to be for staff only (retired staff and honorary staff who have declined a position are obviously allowed to comment as usual), but if regular members have any useful suggestions or information about different forum providers/types they should definitely ask a staff member to post it for them here via their message wall.

Please take note that the future survival of the wiki via a properly functioning forum should preferably be priority number one for all of us in our work here until this situation has been solved.

If you wish to contact Fandom, you can use the page linked below, but make sure to be as well-articulated and polite as you can, or they are very unlikely to listen to you:

https://fandom.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

The main plan in summary
1) Decide an appropriate type of forum platform that fulfills our needs. Competent technical support from trusted members of the community is also appreciated.

2) Set up the forum platform at a homepage address that has been bought by my friend, and preferably install Cloudflare in conjunction.

3) Invite the staff members via the wiki chat, and help each other out to set up the same types of sub-forums as currently, and to copy-paste initiate the most important ongoing wiki threads, especially the administrative ones. We should also try to configure the forum settings as well as possible, including for it to have the same background colour theme as currently

4) Help each other to give temporary single use invitation links to all of the regular members. It is extremely important that everybody select the exact same usernames as they use in the wiki, in order to avoid constant mass-confusion.

Take note that I am already extremely overworked as it is, and cannot give out invitation links to several hundred (possibly over a thousand) active wiki members on my own. I need help from the rest of the staff in that regard.

5) The regular members also start to all help out with copy-pasting or summarising all relevant ongoing discussions to the new forum.

6) Update the wiki's community messages, the front page, and the Discussions rules to automatically inform new members about the move to an external forum, and everybody should actively inform any members that post in the old forum about it as well. Setting up the old wiki-style forums as an extra means of communicating with them, wouldn't hurt either.

Other
Another, obviously much less relevant, but nevertheless rather important, thing that we should do for the sake of organisation, is to start a "Polls" sub-forum for Discussions, move all of the current spammed voting polls there, and write in the Discussions rules that it is only allowed to post them there, and start to moderate Discussions more heavily in that regard, so any that are posted in other sub-forums are moved there instead. Moving all of the current threads will take some work, but it can be done if several staff members help out.

Here is a link that will help you to do so:

https://vsbattles.fandom.com/f?catId=2829467799590537620,175043,2829467799892527511

Help would be very appreciated.

Suggested forum platforms so far

Discourse
Pros:

• Stable and popular.
• Has an invitation only registration feature.

Cons:

• Only 15 staff members maximum for 300$ a month, alternately requires technical expertise to set up for just 20$ a month.
• It is not possible to subscribe to threads.

XenForo
Pros:

• Stable and popular.
• Customisable notifications.
• Internal PMs messages.
• Relatively cheap.

Cons:

• No invitation only registration for version 2.x, which would potentially allow the trolls to snatch up hundreds of our usernames.

vbulleti
Pros:

• Seems to have most of the standard forum functions that we have currently.

Cons:

• It does not appear to allow invitation only registration.

Well, this is concerning. I hope this receives attention. It seems like a big issue. Sorry if my post in this thread is an inappropriate intrusion.

"A few days ago (In connection with Friday the 13th. Make of that what you will) "

Sorry, I couldn't stop myself from laughing there...

Anyway, this is certainly not something I was prepared for. Most of us are quite accustomed to the forums, so adapting to this I imagine won't come easily.

What will happen to the old threads? I believe there was something about them being archived and still usable, correct?

@Imaginym

I also sincerely hope that the people in this community take this issue extremely seriously, and help out as well as they can with what I wrote in the first post.

@Andy

We desperately need to come together and collaborate regarding this. I definitely cannot do it all on my own.

@Crabwhale

The threads will all be moved to the corresponding Discussions sub-forums, but also turn much harder to find.

It is also possible that we will be able to save them via a requested Database dump, if somebody has an extremely large hard drive to store them in, but I am not certain.

https://vsbattles.fandom.com/wiki/Special:Statistics

Think of all the links that we will have to change.

I think that the links to threads will be automatically redirected to Discussions, at least if the Fandom technical team does its job properly.

Anyway, what we need to do right now is investigate which type of forum service/platform that is most useful for us. Information and suggestions are extremely appreciated.

After that, my friend can start to set up the page.

I don't really think my current thoughts on the matter are really appropriate or safe to be expressed in this thread, as it stands, buuut nevertheless, I am pretty sure we can figure something out before the end of the year. Situation's bad, no doubt, but there's really no use in getting stressed over it. Just a friendly reminder for everyone here.

@Hykuu; joke comments are extremely unhelpful.

And you are now the 3rd non-staff member to comment on this thread.

Considering the complete and total incompetence on display here, my hopes are not high.

I will help as much as I can when the time comes.

I'm just thankful that the move to an independent forum is being considered here because I don't think the wiki could survive being forced to use Fandom's alternative Discussion forums.

Just a note that, as far as I am aware, an external forum has worked out quite well for the Anime Characters Fight and Outskirts Battledome wikis, so it should be possible to adjust and adapt to this for us as well.

I agree, Ive always opted for a Indepedant forum in the event of stuff like this happening

I agree with the independent forum, and bless whoever your friend is for even considering giving us that option.

In regards to the requirements of the new forum:

Another point is that we will need the ability for staff to ban people and remove their accounts.

Handing out invites to the most important people is good for the start, but not a healthy system long term. So eventually we should just let people register themself freely at which point we need the above mentioned function to ban people using fake names and give their accounts to the real people.


Should money for maintaining the forum become a problem we can probably also raise a little bit as community. (or we could put adds on the website so that it finances itself...)

Ads seem good.

I agree with an independent forum here cuz this seems way too much of a hassel tbh. Though i can see the issue DT is saying on how to get rid of disruptive ppl

@DontTalkDT

People who are administrators or moderators here should obviously get comparable privileges in the new forum.

The registrations per invitation only should not last forever, no. It is mainly as protection from the trolls and other malicious people who will want to mess this up for us.

Continuously raising money for the running costs via ads and donations is a good idea, yes.

We should probably also set up sub-forums for the connected Joke Battles and FCOC wikis.

That would be nice yes.

No problem.

Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, we need to start to investigate different options for stable and secure, easy to use and customise, forums systems here. I would be extremely grateful if our community, staff and non-staff alike, start to investigate this as well as they can by reading up on information, testing, and asking around.

I have heard that Mediawiki is a good alternative to Fandom but I'm unsure if they have forums the way we do.

So is this a complete migration or will some functions stay here?

I have been looking a short look at Discourse. It looks good as far as I can tell from a normal user perspective.

What are "tags" there will be what are "Topics" to our current forum posts, yes?

Is it possible to let users freely add tags or will they always come from a list prepared by the staff? Because if they come from a list, we will have to keep that updated with at least all verses.

That would be possible, given that the amount of new verses per day is limited, but not ideal.

This seems to be like one of the most serious situations in the wiki to date, and as such I'm willing to help with everything I can.

As for the Tags subject DT is talking about, we currently handle the Topics in a similar way. Verses that doesn't have a verse page are dismissed from the list because there's no 'official' page to link them to.

On the other side, the work might not be as hard as we think if we consider the current situation with the Wiki Audit Hub. Many verses are about to be deleted due to unreliability, and if nothing changes for them we should ignore them to ease the migration work.

Are we migrating the entire thing tho? I got the impression we were just going to have our discussions elsewhere

I'm probably confused about the exact details of the migration.

My main worry for this would actually be the monetary cost of hosting discussions with the number of page views we get. I'd help keep it afloat as much as I can, but I think having some way to keep the forums up in the long-term should be one of the most important factors in the decision.

Whether that comes in the form of using an external provider that will take all our traffic for free, or from a platform that lets us integrate ads. Because while community donations can aid that, with the age demographic of the site it'd likely rely on a relatively small pool of individuals, and if they lose interest in the site the forums could go under.

I believe it is just forum migration but not 100% sure. Also, how will you keep tabs on discussions for certain characters?

The Calaca said:

I'm probably confused about the exact details of the migration.

Click to expand...

We're only migrating the Forums feature.

The rest of the wiki will still be here.

Well, then the amount of work while considerably large, is far better than I thought.

DontTalkDT said:

I have been looking a short look at Discourse. It looks good as far as I can tell from a normal user perspective.

What are "tags" there will be what are "Topics" to our current forum posts, yes?

Is it possible to let users freely add tags or will they always come from a list prepared by the staff? Because if they come from a list, we will have to keep that updated with at least all verses.

That would be possible, given that the amount of new verses per day is limited, but not ideal.

Click to expand...

I do not know almost anything about Discourse, but an alternative for our discussion topics would be a very useful function, yes.

The staff would probably have to manually add topics (/tags?) for our verse pages, yes. It isn't optimal, but it is workable.

We're only migrating the Forums feature.

The rest of the wiki will still be here.

This is correct, yes.

Agnaa said:

My main worry for this would actually be the monetary cost of hosting discussions with the number of page views we get. I'd help keep it afloat as much as I can, but I think having some way to keep the forums up in the long-term should be one of the most important factors in the decision.

Whether that comes in the form of using an external provider that will take all our traffic for free, or from a platform that lets us integrate ads. Because while community donations can aid that, with the age demographic of the site it'd likely rely on a relatively small pool of individuals, and if they lose interest in the site the forums could go under.

Click to expand...

We would have a Paypal button to help alleviate the costs, and non-members can obviously also donate, but the vast majority of of our current page views are likely for the regular wiki, not the forums.

Well, we only have so many options, so we can't afford to be picky, but it would be a good idea to make a transition system blog.

What do you mean with transition blog?

We should still try to find and choose the best available forum system for our purposes in any case.

@ant some of us (may) have other means of communication outside of the wiki itself (i.e discord for naruto, as far as i know, is extremely active, and we would happily help out if u ask us anything in specific), so i will link this to the naruto discord, and hopefully someone there smarter than me has something better to say.