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:

• "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.

Thanks for your attention Shambala108 ☎ 20:11, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

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)

Sorry for creating the page without asking, it was rash of me. I am just increadibly fustrated about the fact that there is nowhere to discuss policy at the moment. "Anyone can start a policy page" is actually stated in a box above the edit window when creating a page in the Tardis namespace, which is a thing that Tardis has customised, so it is local policy. From Scrooge's message, creating a new namespace such as [[TemporaryForum:]] requires asking Fandom staff (any page created with that prefix now would just be in the (main) namespace which is not desireable) and there is no garuntee that they would aprrove it. At that point, it would be easier to ask for the [[Forum:]] to be configured to allow all editors to create pages in it. Anyhow, I hope that the admins can come to a decision to resolve this issue. Bongo50 (aka Bongolium500) ☎ 21:02, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

It is hardly "overruling" CzechOut's decision because, to my knowledge, he never ruled against having temporary forums. He simply stated that they were not needed because forums were returning soon. It is unbelievable that an admin would rather say "it'll have to do" than actually try and solve a relatively easy problem. RadMatter ☎ 21:54, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

I agree entirely with @RadMatter here.

There are much bigger issues than one good-natured user attempting to the Forums back of his own volition, especially as @CzechOut has made countless claims that he will bring back the forums for well over an entire year now, each time completely failing to deliver on his promises. And to be perfectly honest, can you guys instead look at the bigger picture as opposed to berating @Bongolium500? We need Forums.

While I'm not an admin, I entirely disagree that this should be an admin decision to instate Temporay Forums, mainly because this concerns every active editor on this site. Therefore, I would like advocate for the Temporary Forums to be instated immediately. Otherwise, the communal list of threads to be created is only going to get longer.

Epsilon📯 📂

22:35, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Please don't engage in this sort of hyperbolic phrasing, making User:CzechOut sound as though he is intentionally, guiltily withholding the Forums from us and breaking his promises. He is a busy man in real life, who has very good reasons for having focused his attention elsewhere than the Wiki. It is not my place to divulge them, but I shouldn't have to. Of all the Wiki's bedrock rules, assuming good faith remains one of the foremost.

Has the fact that the return of the Forum is way overdue harmed the Wiki? Unquestionably yes. But there is no need to attack individual users. If the 2020s have taught any of us anything, it is that sometimes the world simply decides to throw a garage's worth of wrenches in everybody's plans. We do have to deal with the consequences, but wasting time pointing fingers will not achieve that.

Let this be the final mention of User:CzechOut's lateness with the Forums, or the Wiki's alleged past mishandling of matters up till now, in this discussion. We must look to the present and future if this talk page is to achieve anything: let's focus on the solutions, not the blame. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 04:14, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

I'll let the admins decide how to solve this as Scrooge has suggested, but I just wanted to share my opinion: I see no downsides in having a temporary forum, and not having them only further inhibits progress on the wiki. Chubby Potato ☎ 04:27, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

I honestly don't have much to say that hasn't already been said. As been pointed out above, we have several threads -to-be piled up, with God-knows-how-many down the line. Now knowing that there is a viable (even if temporary) means to allow them to be created, I believe we should enable it.

Once our propper forums are ready to go (be it tomorrow, next week or whenever Czech is able to finish them, no rush there) we can transfer the archived threads to the approppriate place, as well as transfering any active discussions towards the newly-restored threads. OncomingStorm12th ☎ 17:36, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

I don't see any issues, personally, with transferring archives over after-the-fact. It seems useful to have a place to continue discussions in the meantime. Is the idea that everyone would be editing this one page? If we do go forward with this idea, I think we should institute a limit on the number of forum "threads" for this page.
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 18:54, 4 December 2021 (UTC)