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Community Central

The Forum feature provided a central location for discussion about the topic of a wiki and other matters important to the community. Any user could participate in a Forum conversation, and registered users could follow discussion threads and receive notifications when updates occurred. The overall structure of the Forum was managed by the community's administrators and discussions moderators.

As of February 2021, all Forum content has been migrated to Discussions. See Help:Discussions FAQ for why Forum was retired.

Step-by-step[]

Forum hierarchy[]

A wiki's Forum had three levels:

  • Special:Forum – This page was linked from the wiki's navigation and listed all of the boards on the Forum, and their descriptions. On all wikis, this special page now redirects to the Discussions overview.
  • Boards – These were different subject areas within the Forum, containing discussion threads. On wikis whose Forums migrated to Discussions, the Board: links now direct to the migrated Discussions categories.
  • Threads – These were the actual user discussions, and below the most recent reply, topics could be added to connect a given thread to specific articles on the wiki. Links to these old threads now direct to their migrated variants in Discussions, and "topics" have been converted to Discussions "tags".

Legacy threads[]

Links from old Special:Forum threads may appear in Special:WhatLinksHere or other maintenance reports such as Special:WantedPages. While these can be ignored, editing the threads to remove them can be tricky due to the thread pages themselves redirecting to Discussions. Simply deleting the threads is also undesirable, since this would eliminate the redirects and only serve to produce more broken links.

To clear out unwanted links while preserving the redirects, bot software or Dev Wiki scripts such as RemoveLegacyThreads can be used to blank the thread pages. Further, Special:PrefixIndex/Board Thread: can display a list of all legacy Forum threads, so one can preemptively blank all thread pages if desired. Be sure to use these tools from a bot account as a courtesy to your fellow editors, and only with permission from a local community!

Gallery[]

See also[]

Further help and feedback[]