What are new-style Forums and Message Walls?[]
New-style Forums are accessed by Special:Forum (the link will be red until we enable them) and have a nice large-sized threaded layout with a mini-left-sidebar on each post with the avatar of the user who posted that links to their message wall (which I'll cover next). You can also give kudos (similar to Facebook Likes), if you think a post is particularly good. If you've ever used the Community Central forums, then you know how they work. If not, you can read more about them at Help:Forum.
Message Walls are a replacement for user talk pages that have a similar style and working to new-style Forums. Since the new-style Forums usually link to Message Walls instead of user talk pages, they sort of go together. I like Message Walls less than user talk pages, because if you have a high traffic Message Wall, it is more difficult to navigate all the messages, but you don't have to manage sections and signatures. The biggest drawback of Message Walls is no table of contents, but Wikia said they are looking at this for a future upgrade. You can find out more about Message Walls at Help:Message Wall.
Why switch to new-style Forums and Message Walls[]
As old-school as I am, Wikia is working on several new features that we might want to adopt in the future and if we adopt them it would be best if the transition for users was smooth. I also am a big fan of the Source Editor, so things like old wiki-style forums and basic user talk pages work fine for me, because I'm extremely comfortable with adding sections and signatures using Help:Wikitext. However, adding signatures, making new sections manually, or cleaning up stuff added by others who forgot to make sections is something I'm not a huge fan of.
Let's face it, new-style Forums and Message Walls are just plain easier to use. You can't get posts by different users easily mixed up and you don't need to manually add signatures. You can still use wikitext and add a signature if you want to, but you don't have to.
When are we switching?[]
I plan to give it about 2-weeks to a month to gather feedback (via comments to this blog) and do the switch after that, assuming the feedback isn't overwhelmingly negative. We can always switch back, but unfortunately, archiving of new-style Forums and Message Walls doesn't work great so it will be harder to see posts made during the time when they are enabled.
The transition should be pretty seamless, but we will try to fix any issues ASAP.
I will update this blog in response to feedback.