User blog:Dr. Sonya/New forums

Hey everybody I'm back. :) Anyways, for those of you who don't visit central I wanted to bring you a update on the forums.

Recently, staff has started working on a update to the forums, to make it more like a website forum. As I'm sure you know, wiki-wide discussions are really important. There are many decisions that are made by the community at large, from design to content structure, and drives to engage new users. MediaWiki's standard Forum namespace is basically just blank pages that you can put templates on -- they don't offer a lot of the features that a Forum usually does. The Forum we're working on offers a more efficient way to have wiki-wide conversations:


 * Discussions are threaded, so you can follow individual conversations rather than pages with multiple conversations
 * Notifications, both on-wiki and in e-mail, help you keep track of the conversations you're involved in
 * Wiki admins can create Boards to organize threads
 * Threads are automatically sorted by most recent reply, or by most active thread
 * Automatic signatures and timestamps
 * A new way for admins to highlight discussions that they want everyone on the wiki to see -- a more efficient system than the Community Corner! :)

The staff has given us a demo of just what these forums look like, here is link. http://communitytest.wikia.com/wiki/Board%3AForum_Feedback

Also, i designed a template to have quotes like real site forums have! Use this code: Now, you can type a reply to a other certain reply! NOTE: I already sent this idea to staff and they have just finished installed it. So you will not have to use this template when you want to quote something. :)

These forums will be out around next month, i can't wait!- Sonya says,   stay fabulous!!!  02:51, August 3, 2012 (UTC)