Thread:NoWayThisUsernameIsAlreadyOwnedBySomeone/@comment-24851773-20171221013608/@comment-26143371-20180106234322

Hey, sorry for the late replay. I've mostly not been around over the last two weeks. And I wanted to give my answer some thought before posting it.

No, we haven't been contacted so far, or at least I wouldn't know about it (which seems unlikely).

I tend to follow the stuff that's going on over at CC, so I am aware of Discussions and it eventually replacing Forums. My personal main concern with Discussions right now is that it is not possible for anonymous users to participate in them. I know why this decision was made and I understand the reasoning behind it. For us however the ability of anonymous users to be able to post in the Forums is an important part of how we use them.

Let me give a little bit of backstory: The game this wiki is about has a feature called "Neighbour towns". It basically allows people to visit the towns of their Origin and Facebook friends. Visiting friends often and collecting "Friend Points" is mandatory in order to unlock some of the in-game items. Additionally visiting friends usually makes it easier to obtain limited time content from special events. Usually one needs at least 30 to 50 friends, which in some cases have to be actively playing as well in order to be helpful.

Apparently most people do not know that many people that are playing the game. Therefore it is common practice to add random people that have posted their usernames online or to do the reverse and let other people add you. We are currently using Forums (or more specifically the Origin Usernames Corkboard) as a place where people can do this. If you look through it you will see that most of the post are made by anonymous users. I would estimate that about 30% to 40% of total Forum activity is anonymous users posting in this board.

Those users tend to not be interested in becoming editors or community members and will therefore avoid creating user-accounts for what is mostly one-time usage. From how I see it they have two interests: a) Getting information on new content b) finding neighbours. Now if they don't have the possibility to do the second anymore, chances are good that they find another place where they can do both. In my experience people tend to prefer having one tool for all their needs as opposed to several tools with each one being targeted for a specific use-case.

I've thought about alternatives how we could do this in the future, but can't come up with a viable option. Anything that feels like editing a wiki-page discourages a lot of people from using it. So some page in e.g. the Project namespace that is regularly cleared wouldn't work. Allowing people to post their usernames in article comments isn't feasible either. We had this in the past (before my time, but I've seen the results) and it resulted in a lot of noise in the high traffic pages thereby rendering any on-topic comments basically unfindable. Additionally article comments are supposed to eventually be Discussion based as well. So this wouldn't be a long term solution either. We could create some JavaScript based solution where users can enter their names and then store that on some page or "abuse" the AbuseFilter (à la Runescape voting system) as an API backend for it. But for mobile users this would work even less than forums currently do, so I would really like to avoid that, especially considering that this wiki is about a mobile game. Additionally it would require quiet some implementation time which could instead be spend improving wiki content and which at least I don't actually have. Doing the same as an external service and pointing viewers to there could solve the mobile issue. But it still has the implementation time constraint and additionally will require paying for a web hosting service somewhere.

I always meant to send this to Special:Contact/feedback, to see if someone at Fandom sees a suitable solution to this. Though I never got around to it because I wanted to gather some hard evidence of Forum usage first and never had the time for that.

So...that was my personal main concern. Of course there is still some other things that I think are important (mainly highlighting), but that's already planned, so I guess it's OK if it's not there at first.

Also now that this wiki is important enough that we are actively contacted it's probably a good idea to make a forum post as you suggested and see what the others think about it. So I will do that.

PS It's not really related to this, but since you mention the community apps: We seem to have one for Android, but not for iOS. Is there any reason for that?