Board Thread:Wiki-Related Questions and Answers/@comment-4839682-20130318223636/@comment-4975807-20130319190503

I would like to say I have responded to several people in the comments complaining about the new conversation/discussion system, and I can kind of understand where they are coming from; despite how rudely *some* of you have expressed your opinions. Perhaps they have been to other wikias and seen it's the same exact system of everyone having free rein to comment in the comment sections of each page with no structure or rules about what goes where, and then they come here and it's "no discussions in the comments area, please use the forums". But to me, it naturally makes sense. The comments section of each page is right there for people to discuss issues in editing the page article, but everything else in the theories/questions/answers area should go on the forums where it's a more structure based area to be able to have a proper dialogue with other users on a topic.

I'll be honest. Several things have irked me in the past about comments, and here's a list of them.

1) People commenting almost the same exact thing. Example: After the airing of the Cricket Game, literally everyone was *swarming* both The Cricket Game episode page as well as the Belle (Storybrooke) page in the comments writing whole pages of one sentence comments about Belle's fate and how awful it is and such. It wasn't a discussion. It was person after person writing their own comment like, "Omg Belle!" or "Noo, Belle!" That went on for more than one page on the Belle page. I don't know about you, but that doesn't look like a very constructive and meaningful conversation to me. Now try to have that same fashion of comments go on per episode airing . Now you see the comments would super huge for no reason.

2) However, the comments section *did* have some good discussions and theories, but the issue with the comments is the style of the comment threads. First, if new incoming comments are posted on the first page, the large theory thread that already exists on the first page is pushed back a page. This happened frequently and constantly, and it's hardly easy when someone posts the same question or theory which happens to exist 5 pages back, and then to tell that person to please go to page 5 to read the existing thread; especially when the user may not automatically find it because he/she has to scroll through the whole list of comments on page 5 just to see the thread he/she is looking for.

3) Shipping comments. Again, I did not like in the past comments system that people used the comments area as a place to write comments like "Captain Hook + Emma Swan = Captain Swan" or <3 CaptainSwan" or such similar comments. It just makes no sense to post it there on either Emma or Hook's page because each individual page is dedicated to the character itself, and neither are pages shipping the two of them.  Also, it did not help that some people liked to post the same shipping comment on more than one character page.   I also believe these kinds of shipping comments or discussions are better used on the forums.

4) People posting links for spoilers in the comments. Whether it was a link for a new casting call, behind the scene photos or a spoiler link with new episode information, these links were often posted more than once on different pages, and having the same conversations going on different pages. The whole idea of the forums is to create and condense an area that people can have efficient conversations about various topics  without having it explode to having it posted literally everywhere on the wikia pages.