Hey gang!
Since I got a lot of support tickets from this community recently, I wanted to address the Forums retirement specifically with y'all here.
Why are we retiring Forums code?
Forums is built on code which was specifically designed for the very custom and very outdated version of MediaWiki which the Fandom platform currently runs on. As we build the new version of Fandom on much newer software, which delivers 7 years worth of improvements for wikis in general, such custom code is having to be retired. Custom code in MediaWiki is a problem because it makes updating MediaWiki very difficult, as we have to pull out the custom stuff to make the updates, then put them back in afterwards.
How did we get here?
When the decision was made, years ago, to maintain a custom fork of MediaWiki instead of update alongside the Wikimedia Foundation, it was done so because they were not delivering new features at the cadence which then Wikia needed. The correct decision, given all the information at the time, was to go it alone and develop features ourselves. Had we known what the future would bring, such a decision may have gone the other way. As such, custom features like Forums came to be and hindered our ability to get back into the core MediaWiki updates flow.
What are we doing about Forums-style engagement?
We are moving Forums content over to Discussions/Feeds, which will be getting improvements to make the experience better for Forums-heavy communities than the product currently is today. Discussions/Feeds is built outside of the core wiki software, which means we can maintain it much better than the way Forums was built, ensuring that we won't be preventing from upgrading the core wiki experience or having to remove the Discussions/Feeds feature in order to do so. This is a much better option for the entire platform moving forward, as it allows us to focus MediaWiki work on the wiki functionality, while Forums-style engagement is handled in a way that can get its own focus.
We fully understand the level of passion which our Forums-heavy communities, like Wings of Fire, have and the level of engagement they see in such content. That is why we have committed to more development of Discussions/Feeds, with a focus on making it more useful for communities which love Forums.
We will have a blog post on Community Central soon, which - among other things - will talk about the first of these improvements, but you should know that Forums will remain in place for communities which use them significantly, like Wings of Fire, until at least April. I'm happy to answer questions that I am able to answer at this time.