Forum:Community site

Alright, I'd like to re-open discussion about the community site. Personally, I more and more believe having two separate sites does not work in our favor as it essentially splits activity between the two. This effect is aggravated by the lack of account integration, but even with it, I still believe the two separate sites are a disadvantage for us. News and forums specifically generate on-site activity which has a trickle-down effect on article editing ("while I'm here, might as well...") which simply doesn't happen with separate sites.

Of course, that's just my opinion and whatever we do in the end should be based on a community decision. I'd just like to gather people's views on this matter and present some suggestions/alternatives for re-integrating community site functionality with the wiki. -- Porter21 (talk) 11:27, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Alternative 1: Wikilogs
More info: Full list of features


 * Wiki pages are configured to act as blogs, which are called "wikilogs". Just like blogs, each wikilog contains a number of published articles, with the most recent ones displayed on the wikilog main page in reverse chronological order.
 * One or more custom namespaces are configured as Wikilog namespaces; pages created directly in these namespaces become wikilogs, while subpages to these pages become wikilog articles (blog posts) and are listed automatically on that wikilog's main page.
 * The extension provides the extra functionality for wikilogs and wikilog articles. Wikilog articles inherit all the usual wiki functionality, like wiki syntax, edit history, page categories, talk pages, etc. Among the features added by the extension are: automatic listing of articles, setting of article authors, handling of article comments, generation of syndication feeds (Atom and RSS) for individual wikilogs and for all wikilogs of the wiki, etc.
 * The philosophy of Wikilog is not to just make a blog out of a wiki, but to combine both concepts. Unlike most blogs, wikilog articles can be collaboratively written and published by multiple users. Talk pages of wikilog articles provide a simpler interface for commenting than standard MediaWiki talk pages. It is similar to most blog software, with the addition of discussion threading.

I believe it's a good alternative to Wikia blog functionality. It supports basically everything we need; comments, blog listings, RSS/Atom feeds, wiki syntax in posts and comments, categories etc. Unlike Wikia blogs however, news articles are not attributed to a single user and can be edited by multiple (non-admin) users. In combination with namespace editing restrictions, you could even restrict news posting to certain user groups. Another possibility would be having one namespace for news and one for user-written blogs (if we do want to have the latter). As far as I can see, it also doesn't clutter RC as much as the Wikia extension and works well with parser caching.

The only downside from my point of view is that the comments aren't displayed directly on the blog article itself, but I think that's neglible.

Alternative 1: LiquidThreads
Sample screenshot: Sample page: mw:Extension talk:LiquidThreads


 * LiquidThreads (LQT) is an extension for MediaWiki that implements a threaded discussion page system.
 * LiquidThreads replaces discussion pages with actual forums, giving the following benefits:
 * A clear, simplified post/reply workflow so new users can jump right into the discussion.
 * Simple management of threads, including automation of archival, refactoring, and other tasks currently undertaken by bots and humans.
 * A powerful, flexible notification system, allowing users to keep abreast of developments in areas in which they are interested, ranging from entire discussion pages to discussion fragments.
 * Support for following discussion pages with RSS feeds.
 * Flexible post ordering, allowing users to keep track of which threads on a talk page are dead, and which threads are active.
 * A modern, AJAX-based interface, that allows users to quickly post and reply to other posts, without clumsy page loading.
 * Automatic signatures.

Don't be scared by the extension being marked as "experimental"; it's stable enough that it's used on several Wikimedia wikis (i.e. wikis maintained by the organization behind Wikipedia).

From my point of view, the main downsides of wiki-style forums compared to standard forums are the need for manually signing posts and the whole manual indentation stuff, both of which do not come naturally to inexperienced editors. LQT addresses both of that.

This is my preferred alternative. Once LQT 3.0 is released, I'm going to suggest that it be rolled out to article talk pages as well, but that's for a later discussion. For now, I'd suggest it only to be activated in the forum namespace. It's maintained by Wikimedia which is another plus in my book.

Alternative 2: AWC's Forum
Sample screenshot: Sample site:


 * This extension creates a standalone forum within MediaWiki.
 * It uses MediaWiki's user authentication system so the forum users details are identical, and the log in process is transparent and perfectly integrated.
 * Users can create new threads/topics, where others may posts replies to. Users may also quote posts, and edit their own posts (permissions dependent).
 * Moderators can edit, delete and move threads. Moderators can also make these threads 'stickys' or 'locked'.
 * Admins can give and remove the permissions required to be a moderator, and may add and remove many restrictions on users forum accounts. Admins may also make changes to the forums, such as add and delete categories and forums, make 'announcements', make changes to many forum configuration settings and do general 'maintenance'.

A viable alternative, but I feel using LQT is the more future-proof alternative (since this is a third-party extension while LQT is maintained by Wikimedia).

Alternative 3: WikiForum
Sample site:


 * WikiForum extension adds a discussion forum in the form of a new special page, Special:WikiForum. WikiForum pages for the most part are indexed by search engines (such as Google) and you can search them by using WikiForum's internal search.

Chat
I haven't found any good alternatives yet unfortunately.

Discussion
I honestly agree with most of this. User Avatar talk.png 22:54, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

I'd support alternative #1. As for the chat, could a Java-based web IRC client be used? Tagaziel 19:59, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

I like both alt #1s so I say go with those unless we can find something better then the two. Shadowrunner56 20:37, 11 December 2011 (UTC)


 * There's only one for the blog substitutes, but I agree that it is good. As for the forums, I prefer it as it is, or if not, Alt. 2 was better in my opinion. TheGuardianCalligraphy.pngGuardianoftheWastesTag.png

Well, my question was more whether you share my view that these things should be moved back to the wiki itself in the first place. I don't want to force people to do anything, I'm a fan of community-based decisions :) -- Porter21 (talk) 23:18, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
 * And that is what I agree on, keeping it to one site. It was a nightmare to set up an account there, which is very discouraging to people migrating accounts. There are benefits and disadvantages to do it either way. But I agree that it seems to be best to integrate it into one location. — User avatar tag.gif Avatar talk.png 12:51, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree completely that the two sites don't really work because they still seem like two different wikis, rather than the community site being an extension of this one. Anyway of moving it back would of course be preferable. TheGuardianCalligraphy.pngGuardianoftheWastesTag.png
 * I agree completely. Especially when it comes to blogs. We really lack the speed of reaction. News can be posted on the Vault 2-3 days later than on DAC or NMA. I really like the Wikilogs extension. As for forum I'm not sure which extension is better but I think any of them wouldn't be a problem for me to get used to. :) veryblackraven 07:45, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

I also agree. It dose seem like two wikis.--Ant2242 22:12, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

I pretty much agree with everything listed...I really like Tagaziels suggestion for a java based chat client, the current one no one uses. Most people are still using the Wikia one. ---bleep196- 14:45, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

For the forums I like the LiquidThreads layout. Great Mara 17:40, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

I'd say you're right - the experiment with the community site is not really working out that well, and we might benefit from getting these things back on the wiki itself. Ausir 19:08, 15 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Maybe we could start with Wikilog and work our way from there? I'd call the namespace "News" for now - if we do decide that we want other types of blogs as well, we can add separate namespace for these later.
 * Not sure whether people noticed, but I added a third alternative for the forums, "Wikiforums". I'd actually consider that one my favourite for now; it's not as bloated as AWC's forum but provides everything we need. And the "experimental" status of LQT is bothering me more than I originally thought. -- Porter21 (talk) 14:32, 16 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I noticed, just been thinking which one would be best. At the moment I favour the same one as you. It is a clean simple layout, plus I like it having a quick response box already loaded, which encourages people to contribute to discussions. User avatar tag.gif Avatar talk.png 21:28, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

The problem with the community site is that its forums seem to be completely redundant to the "wiki forum" that this very discussion thread is hosted on, and that people who migrated from wikia are more used to using. Furthermore, the complete lack of integration of the community site with the wiki makes me feel that the community site is the one that should be tossed out the window (as opposed to this wiki forum). However, I would also recommend that whatever replacement solution is chosen should also supersede this wiki-based forum if everyone likes it better. By the way, I do like the sound of the alternative blog and forum (#1) solutions presented here; let's try them out! --(talk 15:28, 11 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Hunterz, that is what is being discussed, getting rid of the community site and also replacing the existing forum here with a better alternative. 164.38.32.28 16:36, 11 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I know, I'm just throwing in my (long-winded) support in hopes that it will help push things in that direction. I was also pointing out that both forums here should also ultimately be replaced with a single solution. --HunterZ_tiny.png(talk 16:57, 11 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah, that's what GA was saying ;) Once we get an improved forum system in place on the wiki itself, we'll get rid of the community one.
 * Just to explain why there are currently two forums - originally there wasn't supposed to be any overlap. All the game/setting discussion forums were supposed to reside at the community site while only the wiki discussion one would have remained here (since we need wiki syntax support for that one due to the nature of things being discussed there). However, since it quickly became clear that the community site wasn't going to take off, nobody started working on setting it up that way. -- Porter21 (talk) 16:05, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

Getting into gear
Moving forward, should I create a poll for which forum solution to use? It makes little sense to make one for the blogs since there's only one option.

What we'd also need to know are what the chances are for getting the wiki upgraded to MW 1.18, since both WikiLogs and WikiForum require that version. Ausir? -- Porter21 (talk) 16:05, 14 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Poll: I'm looking forward to seeing this, but I would hope that the people who have to maintain it would get to look at the admin side of the choices first. As an end-user, I'm not going to be able to factor in how much of a nightmare an admin interface is. --HunterZ_tiny.png(talk 17:27, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Good news - the wiki will be upgraded to 1.18 very soon! Ausir 00:34, 28 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Good to hear. Does that mean we'll also get the backlog of bug reports and change requests looked at finally? -- Porter21 (talk) 13:44, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, hopefully we'll be able to resolve all these errors once we upgrade the site to 1.18. Ausir 14:06, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

A little update
Sorry that there's not been much movement in the past weeks; without 1.18 that wasn't really possible unfortunately. I have, however, been testing the suggested extensions on a local MediaWiki install and figured I'd give a little update on my findings now that we're getting closer to the 1.18 upgrade.


 * "Wikilog" pretty much works as advertised.
 * "LiquidThreads" cannot be used as a forum solution unfortunately. I thought it might be possible with a certain configuration, but it turned out not to work in practice. I've removed it from the list of alternatives.
 * "AWC's Forum" suffers from support issues; the last update was almost a year ago and the only maintainer doesn't seem to be active anymore. It already requires manual hacks to get it working with 1.18; and with the lack of support this will only get worse in the future, so I don't think this is a future-proof alternative. Links on forum pages do not show up in Special:WhatLinksHere and forum (post) edits do not show up on Special:RecentChanges.
 * "WikiForums" has the same issues with WhatLinksHere and RC as "AWC's Forum". In addition, its thread URLs do not really seem SEO-friendly by modern standards; however, the extension page claims that forum pages are indexed by search engines, so this might not be a problem after all.

I'll leave it up to discussion whether the WhatLinksHere and RC issues are that much of a problem in practice. I'd just like to add that these two limitations will apply to pretty much all MediaWiki forum solutions other than the one we're using currently (as it's caused by the implementation of the forum as a "special" page). And while links not showing up in WhatLinksHere means we won't be able to track broken links on these pages, it has the sideeffect that we won't have to bump up old threads anymore to fix broken links.

Long story short, I think WikiForums is the only viable forum alternative at this point. -- Porter21 (talk) 22:37, 2 March 2012 (UTC)


 * One thing you are not taking into consideration here is Curse. All of Curse community sites are run on IPB, and are dealt with by a separate portion of the PHP Team from the wikis. The few wikis we had with integrated forums have since been separated, (the forum on Telarapedia is being removed with/after the 1.18 upgrade). If I were you and wanted more wiki/forum integration, I would look at DiabloFans and see how they have set up specific tags on their forums to link to relevant wiki articles, etc. I do not believe that any request to move the community site to one of the wiki forum extensions will be approved. --Wynthyst 23:16, 2 March 2012 (UTC)


 * What you believe is irrelevant, I'll look into this anyhow. And at worst, we can always consider keeping the current wiki forum + a blog extension and scrapping the community site anyway. Ausir 11:34, 3 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Hmm, hardly an encouraging attitude with all that we sacrificed to come to Curse. That's the spirit... And as for the community site, I don't really think that it is used to any great extent (I still need to be granted admin powers there by-the-way). Φύλαξ [~μίλησε μου~] 12:25, 3 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I have added you as an admin. Ausir 14:01, 3 March 2012 (UTC)


 * No need for the apology, you're not omnipresent ;). Thanks Ausir Φύλαξ [~μίλησε μου~] 23:27, 3 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Personally I am seeing the separate site as a step backwards to what we had. In principle it seemed like a good idea at the time, but in practise it has not turned out any where near as expected. Now that we have the benefit of hindsight, I think the only way forward is to recombine the two so we can move forward. User avatar tag.gif Avatar talk.png 19:07, 4 March 2012 (UTC)