Forum talk:Temporary forums

Deletion
This page has been deleted, at least for now. The rationale given for creating it was given in the edit summary as follows:

"Any user can start a policy page (see the message when creating one), and given that we've been without forums for over a year, it seems that something like this is needed. There is even some consensus for it"

A few points: Thanks for your attention Shambala108 ☎  20:11, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
 * "Anyone can start a policy page" may be physically (or FANDOM-ly true), but as Tardis:Who writes policy states, on this wiki only admins write and pubish a policy page. This is similar to how any user can physically move a page but only admins are permitted on this wiki to move a page.
 * The cited consensus occurred on a talk page (Talk:Bibliophage (short story)), where admin User:Scrooge MacDuck specifically said that he didn't want to overrule User:CzechOut's decision. There are a lot of technical things with making forum posts, and CzechOut is the main admin who understands how that works. Just creating a policy page to cover it won't work (for one thing, the page would become unmanageable with many people responding to many topics). I understand the frustration, but let's be honest, the world hasn't stopped turning since we lost the forums. We are still able to discuss individual issues on the article talk pages, and that is going to have to be enough for now.
 * If CzechOut wants to restore this page, then he will. But please do not take on something like this without at least asking for admin approval. It would be extremely easy for any user or admin to miss discussions on a page like this and not be able to participate. That's why we have designated areas for discussions.


 * I second the fact that User:Bongolium500 should have checked with admins before creating this page.


 * That being said, another thing I mentioned at Talk:Bibliophage (short story) was that if we can create a consensus for it between us other active admins, I would personally be in favour of creating temporary forums of some sort. You say that "the world hasn't stopped turning", but… the issues that cannot by policy be resolved on talk pages, and/or which affect multiple pages, really are piling up to an alarming degree. Bongolium500's attempted solution may have been rash, but I do think we should be looking for a solution.


 * I agree that a single page wouldn't be manageable, with multiple editing it and such (although to play Devil's Advocate, that is how Forum:The original Panopticon worked!). This is why the temporary solution I would advocate, as I mentioned at Talk:Bibliophage (short story), would be a pseudo-DPL Forum, with individual pages for "threads" — either in another namespace than Forum: ( TemporaryForum: ?), or with subpages, set up similarly to userspace sandboxes. This way, individual "threads" would appear in Special:RecentChanges (allowing the community to easily see what discussions are being held), and once the real DPL Forums are activated, we could batch-rename these pages to move them to the "Forum:" namespace and thus into the proper archive.


 * …But yeah, at the end of the day, this isn't something a user should just start on his own with no explicit admin authorisation/prior discussion. If we do go forward with something like this, I'd at least want myself, User:Shambala108, User:OncomingStorm12th, User:SOTO and User:Doug86 to form a consensus on the matter first — and we'd also have to, first, notify User:CzechOut of our intentions to make sure that we don't put such a thing together only for him to show up with the proper DPL Forum the day after that. That would be quite silly.


 * In conclusion: @User:Bongolium500, you acted in error, but, I believe, in answer to a very real need of the Wiki at the moment. I'm really hoping we can all work together to find a less arbitrary solution. This talk page seems like the right place for that; I've notified the other active admins mentioned above to get their input in this conversation. My main takeaway from Talk:Bibliophage (short story), aside from the need for the Forums at all, was User:RadMatter chastening us admins for not yet having gotten together to work out a solution to this problem, and indeed, it's past time that we did. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 20:46, 3 December 2021 (UTC)