Board Thread:Wiki Discussion/@comment-27108700-20160910215843/@comment-27345308-20160918092014

So I wanted to state my opinion more extensively now, even though the chat most probably won't close down.

I've been on the chat a lot lately, most of the time it's just me and bot inside, so I find it kinda pointless to keep something that isn't used. On the other side, Discord server is much more active than the chat.

Another thing why I voted supportively towards replacing the chat is that Discord is a much more professional system than Wikia chat. I've investigated a lot on how chat actually works, and the infrastructure of the chat on the backend is terrible to say the least. As the development of a new Wikia feature is usually limited in scope to its initial functionality, chat hasn't had any notable update in years, and probably won't in future, even though in it's current state it's terrible. I even heard from a knowledgable person once that a bug where one can crash the whole chat server easily was known by Wikia Staff for ages, yet nothing was done about it. So don't expect that Staff will make it better, because they most probably won't.

Then again, some of you might ask why to close chat when it doesn't hurt anybody. First of all, I'm usually the only moderator around there, and when I'm not there you can't rely on the bot to always handle trolls. So we're basically leaving a part of the wiki unmoderated. Second thing is that we'll always have to update all sorts of things related to chat even though nobody uses it. I'm the one that will have to restart the chat bot every time it crashes and have to change the codebase to update the antispam plugin or if Wikia refactors the chat again. I'm probably also the only one in position to properly update the Chat.js on the wiki, so in case of a chat plugin misbehaving, more work for me, yay. And also there are chat logs that we have to archive every once in a while, chat help, chat rules, moderator guidelines and other Project pages we have to update every once in a while, emoticons we have to categorize and so on and so forth. So it's much more work on the moderator side than just moderating the chat that a regular user can't notice.

That leads me to thinking, why do most of the people around here oppose the moving to Discord even though they haven't even tried to join the server?

That's my $0.02 in this discussion. The vote closes tomorrow.