Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-34797220-20191206002022/@comment-26339491-20191213213417

I'm a Fandom staff member and I'd just like to clarify a few things here, since there seems to be a good amount of confusion:
 * Fandom will not be shutting down. On the contrary, we have every intention to become even better.
 * Message walls, article comments and user profiles are not going away. They need to be revamped for reasons explained in this blog post, but you will not lose the messages you sent or the comments you made.
 * Forums will be retired early next year, but when that happens, absolutely all Forum content will be migrated to Discussions. Wikis that have threaded forums (Special:Forum) enabled then will get Discussions automatically and all Boards will be moved there (in the form of categories) and all threads will become Discussions threads. Kudos will turn into likes, you will follow the Discussions posts where you previously followed forum threads, and you'll still be notified about new replies to conversations you were involved in. Nothing will be lost and you can continue talking.

Discussions does have some drawbacks, e.g. it doesn't support wikitext and you can't directly quote others. Therefore, if you choose to enable DPL forums here for conversations that have to use wikitext, that's fine, you absolutely can. You can use them in parallel with Discussions, too.

Fandom does indeed plan on making improvements in Discussions, to address some of the big issues it still has. If you want to stay up-to-date on that and get notified if we have news to announce, I suggest you follow the blog I linked above.

If any of you still have questions about this and would like to know more, there's a forum thread here with many more details. It's locked, but if you still have more questions after reading it, you can ping me on my wall or use Special:Contact.

You can also turn to JustLeafy. He's very well informed and has given a lot of really good answers here already. (Thanks for your help in keeping our users informed, btw!)