User blog comment:Danuhau/Message walls - good or bad?/@comment-7697305-20141112075223

Note: All of the below also applies to Wikia's new forums and, to some extent, article comments,

Whether message walls as implemented by Wikia are good or bad depends on whether you are approaching them from a front end or back end perspective. For the former, message walls are certainly easier and more convenient due to not requiring users to sign their posts, automatically notifying participants in threads of new messages, and generally being easier to figure out than talk pages.

For the latter, however, message walls have some technical quirks which can make them much more difficult, frustrating, and/or confusing to manage than talk pages:
 * For instance, every message posted in a message wall thread creates its own separate page (which follows a singularly bizarre naming scheme, no less), which complicates or outright breaks the coding of certain templates which are placed on such threads (example: the monstrous switch parser in the link is necessary due to the nature of Wikia comments, which work similarly to message walls).
 * "Deleting" message wall posts doesn't fully hide them from view, while actually deleting posts isn't exactly intuitive and is irreversible without...weird...side effects.
 * As one last thing to keep in mind: posts on message walls can only be edited by admins, rollbackers, and the author of the post in question.

(There are also some minor concerns about edits breaking the functionality of a user's talk page/message wall being easier to fix on the former than the latter, but I don't expect that to happen here.)

With all that out of the way, I personally prefer talk pages due to liking how much easier it is to browse talk page archives than old message wall threads. However, I would guess that the benefits of switching to message walls probably outweigh the drawbacks for most users on most wikis (this one included).