Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27661991-20191016163816/@comment-27661991-20191022015505

Yeah, as I mentioned in the Q&A thread, if Forums is to be retired - and it doesn't look like they'll be persuaded to keep them - then Discussions is the way forward short of migrating to a third party solution altogether.

DPL-style forums may have to be used for wiki-editing threads, and for those who want to continue to use wiki features in their threads. I think that a lot of users in the latter group will find DPL forums daunting and either accept the limited capabilities of Discussions, jump ship to a third party (be that twitter, instagram, facebook - which really aren't all that different from Discussions, but at least they may already have accounts and a social circle to interact with there, which they lose here - or another forum solution), or just give up altogether.

While I still think that a lot of the aversion to Discussions could be remedied by a change in how it is presented to end-users, their somewhat dosappointing response was: "Thanks for your very detailed feedback on what exactly your community has found to be unhelpful about Discussions! Even though our developers don't have the capacity to work on Discussions right now, it still helps us hone in on those things they really should address first once they do."

Given this, we should definitely be working on at least making the experience here as good as we can get it sooner rather than later and look at alternatives if we do find the experience to be lacking.