| Structured Discussions Portal |
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 Extension deprecated and replaced: This extensionhas been deprecated and is no longer maintained. It has been replaced byDiscussion Tools sinceMediaWiki 1.40. Users are encouraged to stop using it. Communities are encouraged to move their talk pages using Structured Discussions to subpages and stop using them. |
| Structured Discussions |
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Structured Discussions User-to-user communication and collaboration.
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 | This extension is obsolete! It has been replaced byDiscussionTools. |
 | Structured Discussions is no longer in feature development, and new deployments have been suspended. Seemore information here and in theWikitech mailing list.Starting November 2023, communities are progressively encouraged toarchive existing Structured Discussions pages. |
Structured Discussions (previously known as “Flow”) was a project of the now-defunctGlobal Collaboration team at the Wikimedia Foundation to build another discussion system for Wikimedia projects.Structured Discussions aimed to provide features that are present on some other popular websites, but were believed to be impossible to implement inwikitext.For example, Structured Discussions shows readable threads on both mobile and desktop, automatically signs posts, threads replies (with an in-database relation between each), and permits per-topicnotifications.
The main goals for the Structured Discussions project were:
Structured Discussions was deployed on user talk and wiki-wide discussion pages on various languages in the Wikimedia content projects, as well as on MediaWiki.org – seeStructured Discussions/Wikis.On some wikis, including main ones like French Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia and Wikidata, it was available as an opt-in Beta feature, based on community decisions, allowing users to turn on Structured Discussions for their own user talk page.
Structured Discussions was formerly known as “Flow”. Flow was a bigger project that has been re-scoped to focus on user-to-user discussions. The software has been renamed to reflect this change.
After the initial development round, StructuredDiscussions was in active maintenance mode, with no major development since mid-2015; no significant new features have been added since then (other than a rename from "Flow" to "StructuredDiscussions" in 2017).The team continued to support the product and fix bugs and to make sure that people who are using StructuredDiscussions continue to have a good experience.[1]
The Collaboration Team remained interested in the project and in providing an improved system for structured discussions.[1]Communities also expressed interest by requesting StructuredDiscussions for testing or for real usage.To help decide about future development,[2] asurvey was sent to many Flow users in September 2016;[1] theresults were published in February 2017.Those results were used in planning.
StructuredDiscussions improvements were a goal of the2017-2018 Fiscal Year development plan, focusing on search and interactions between topics.Discussions around those improvements led to theTalk pages consultation 2019, where talk pages usages and culture were discussed broadly across the wikis.The result of the Talk pages consultation 2019 was to develop theDiscussionTools extension, implementing many of the same features as Structured Discussions on top of a wikitext backend.
You can have a look atthe quick tour to discover the most important features.