Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-5275700-20151215002536

Greetings from Wikia Community Support! I’m writing today to see if this community might like to participate in the next release stage of a new feature called Discussions.

So what is Discussions?

Discussions is a way to attract new users to your community and capture the energy and passion of fans who already love the content you’ve created. Right now, Discussions are primarily showcased in Community Apps, available for both Android and iOS users. Ben 10 Wiki’s app is one of our more active apps (in terms of readers) and we’re confident that Discussions is a great way to bring new users to your community.

In the Fallout app, one of the places where Discussions was first enabled, we’ve seen over 50,000 users create accounts since October. The vast majority of those users created their accounts to participate in Discussions in some way. That's a big number, and of course Fallout has seen a great deal of activity due to the release of the latest game in the franchise. But even 1% of that is still lots of new accounts and potential editors!

Discussions are also accessible to read and contribute on the web (desktop and mobile). Check out the web versions of Fallout’s discussions at http://fallout.wikia.com/d/f/3035/ and Wookieepedia’s discussions at http://starwars.wikia.com/d/f/147

Up to this point, Wikia staff has been moderating the Discussions taking place in the small number of apps where the feature has been enabled. Basic moderation options are available for the Admin and Moderator user groups, in both the app and web versions. More robust moderation options are coming in the new year, along with plenty of other additions.

A few other notes about Discussions, to answer some of your likely questions:
 * Enabling Discussions won’t have any effect on your current forums. However, we will have the option to migrate all of this forum content to the new Discussions feature in 2016, before we eventually phase out the current forum feature. So you would not have to have two discussion areas for very long.
 * Nothing from Discussions will appear in RecentChanges, WikiActivity or any of your logs. It’s totally separate from the wiki right now. We’ll be working with you and other communities to determine the best ways to monitor activity.
 * Discussions users in the Community app can also upload avatars and add text to a profile page. The avatar will be seen for that user across Wikia, but at this time the profile text is only visible in the app.
 * We'll be adding lots more to Discussions in the beginning of 2016, including image upload, more organizational options, tagging/topic options, and more. We're very interested to hear more about what you'll need for this feature to be successful here.
 * Anonymous users cannot post in Discussions.

Please talk it over as needed and let me know if you have any questions at all. We’d love to have your community help this new feature evolve and expand the reach of your content to even more Ben 10 fans. 