User blog comment:ThatDevilGuy/Message Wall/@comment-1788742-20120202144801/@comment-1788742-20120203165823

Yes, exactly. It's like blog post replies, except worse. And while the blogs are useful, they're not all that the wiki is about. We need talk pages, they're an integral part of MediaWiki. If the message wall was actually a better form of communication (which it isn't) I might actually support it. But it's not. I wouldn't really mind that it looks like a Facebook wall, if it actually functioned better than a talk page. But the fact is, it just doesn't. It floods the recent changes, and displays avatars in the WikiActivity. (I don't actually use the wiki activity, but quite a few users do, especially new users, and it's very misleading, for many reasons.

All it does is make the wall look like Facebook. There's no other purpose. If their goal is ease of understanding for new users, they've just ruined that excuse. The prominence of a user's "real name" over their username is ridiculous, and I can't explain it in any other way other than it's Wikia's next step in changing the site into a social network.
 * I"m going to quote a user from Central here. "The prominence of the user's "real name" as opposed to their user name is insultingly misleading. There is absolutely no reason for this; it simply gets in the way of everything - you can't block someone by their "real name", you can't promote someone by their "real name", you can't search them by their "real name", nor can you contact someone by their "real name". New users who don't know how the system works will attempt to do these things, most importantly, when they need them to work immediately - such as when a user is spamming."


 * Messages are excessively large. Instead of making talk pages more readable, they have instead worsened the problem.


 * Lots of issues in Monobook, and I doubt they'll be fixed anytime soon. There are a lot of posts on this fact on Central.


 * Notification is small and unnoticeable unless you look at the user navigation, which will make it difficult for new users to notice new messages.


 * Every new message has its own subpage. Imagine a user with thousands and thousands of messages who decides to get a rename. Instant flood of thousands of automatically moved subpages and the creation of thousands more redirects.


 * There is absolutely no benefit from adding this. We already have a perfectly adequate and organized form of communication, and we do not need to play around with Wikia's new social networking features.


 * We already have blogs and talk pages, which are both perfectly adequate forms of communication, and are much more organized. Just by viewing Central or Community Test, you can tell that this was not designed for MediaWiki. It's like trying to cram some social add-on into a MediaWiki site, which, fortunately, Wikia still is, at least ostensibly.

I think we should call this to a vote, and see where we stand. A trial period may seem appealing, and that should be a vote option as well. Conversely, we could discuss this at a BoT meeting, though I still stand firmly against the Message Wall. I've been following this project from the very beginning, and seen even very experienced Central users mad about this change. This is a cause for concern. I don't think we should play around with Wikia's new social addons. Test it on Central. Is it really a more organized form of communication? I don't find it so.