User blog:JeloJellyJam/Don't Panic, Stay Calm: Concerning the Discussions migration

So fellow roleplayer told us on Talking Random Stuff some important news. Fandom announced in a blog post that they will be axing Forums, Message Walls and Comments and replacing them with Discussions as part of their Unified Community Platform project. And everyone (well, everyone who was active at that time) panicked about it, knowing they'll have to move to Discussions.

As for me, I have nothing to worry about. I'm okay with the migration to Discussions. I mean, Not only is it like Forums, it's got what you need for a roleplay to run: a notifications system, basic text formatting, bullet/numbered lists, polls, and images! There'll likely be more features added to it as time goes by! But since a lot of you here likely oppose the planned update, I'll try my best to convince you all that this update will not be the end of IaLR.

I can understand why people aren't too keen to move to Discussions. Discussions is inferior when compared to Forums, since it isn't quite feature-packed. The fact that it's not built on MediaWiki supports this fact. There are also concerns of the roleplay going stale when moving to Discussions, though that wasn't because of the platform, rather because we lost interest in roleplaying at the time. I know there are likely more reasons than there are listed, but that's because I didn't bother listing them.

The thing is, change happens. Everything changes, all the time. In this case, all we can do is accept it, rather than get ourselves tangled up in nostalgia, yearning for Forums to come back. And besides, Discussions is kind of like Forums, so I'm pretty sure we can get used to it easily. If we ever have to move to Discussions, let's not do it while gritting our teeth. I don't think it's gonna do anything good, not just for us, but also (quite possibly) for the roleplay itself.

In addition, FANDOM's version of MediaWiki is outdated (a fork of 1.19, to be exact), which means we're missing out on new features and stability updates as well as bug fixes and security fixes. Not to mention, it's a mess. It's a monolith, and it's hard to maintain. For the sake of future-proofing and keeping up-to-date with current MediaWiki versions, FANDOM needs to do this update, even if it means removing a few features.

Now, I know there are likely going to be people who are likely planning to migrate In a Locked Room to other wiki-hosting sites like Wikidot or Miraheze, but I don't think there any other wiki-hosting sites that offer the same flexibility when it comes to forums and roleplaying and stuff as FANDOM (that I know of, though if you find any wiki-hosting site that is flexible and has a built-in forums feature please let me know!).

I'd like to know your thoughts about this whole blog post and the update in general. Due to the controversial nature of this, please keep all discussions civil. Anyway, I hope you have a nice day. 'Cya! JeloJellyJam (talk) 04:21, October 19, 2019 (UTC)