Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26180030-20180818215200/@comment-28890853-20180819011907

Guys...

FANDOM is disabling Forums on every single wiki there is in favour of the crappy Discussions feature. They're going with the smaller ones first, but eventually, the larger wikis, which may keep their Forums a bit longer provided they're active (unless they really want an instant overwrite, e.g. the Sonic Wiki), will lose them too. We don't know when the Forums on this wiki will be removed, but they will be eventually.

To make matters worse, before the Forums are permanently being hakai'd, FANDOM will globally disable the ability to highlight. This is not a joke.

And if you really believe I made that up, go see for yourself.

Tl;dr we'll have to prepare ourselves.

Problem 1: How will we highlight stuff after the feature gets removed?

Solutions: WikiaNotification allows for sending a notification bubble in the bottom right.

A user called Withersoul235 has also imported a script that allows to do the same thing, but allows to send multiple messages, something WikiaNotification can't do. Here's how to operate it. It's mildly complex, but not too hard to use.

It is important to know that only Admins can operate WikiaNotification. Content Mods might be able to operate Notiplus (the second method) but I'm not sure.

We can additionally also employ the use of announcements. This will notify every user that has made an edit or post in the last 90 days, even on other wikis. However, there's not a lot of options and you can only use one simultaneously. Discussions Moderators and Admins only.

Lastly, you can edit the Community Corner. This will send a "Community messages had been updated" notif to every wiki user when they visit, unless you mark it as minor edit.

Once the highlighting gets disabled, we'll have to resort to these four tools instead.

Problem 2: What will happen when we lose the Forums?

I have a solution for the Forum Shutdown as well. We can use the Message Walls of nonexistent users as Forum replacement (and use specific accounts as topic-specific boards), as Wither has done here. Follow the links at the bottom to the other "boards". Essentially, once the actual Forum here goes down, we can set up a pseudo-Forum.

Feel free to give your thoughts and suggestions below.