User blog comment:Salubri/Brand New Feature (Message Wall)/@comment-1393830-20120202022112

Here is my rant on Message Wall. The feature was stolen from facebook. Im not just saying this, I know this to be true as the lead designer of the message wall said once about the new system of messages he was making "I have spent so much time looking at how facebook does notifications that I haven't had time to go on Facebook." The feature is nowhere near ready for release yet. Did you know if you move your message wall and then move it back, you break it? Or that anyone can remove any post from anyone's message wall and the process to restore it is much more complicated, involving many more clicks? Did you know that deleted threads on a message wall are never really gone and that more than likely you will end up on someone's deleted thread rather than the message wall you were going to? The thing is horribly built. It encourages more people to talk rather than edit, encourages people to jump into conversations they are in no way involved in and it is prone to vandalism. Many of the vstf tools for cleaning up Vandalism and Spam do not work on the message wall. Just yesterday, there was a horrible bug in the message wall that caused me to receive a notification every time anyone wrote on anyone's wall on central. The message wall also gives preference to the "real name" field of the masthead and does not include proper timestamps. The biggest problem in activating it here is that it means we give in. The feature is optional at this point. I was told by members of staff that the feature will be optional until enough wikis activate it that they believe it is wanted. By activating it here, we give +1 to that.

If there are any others like me that are concerned with all of this, hit me up on my talk page and I can give you some code so that it will swap out the real name field with the username and give proper timestamps on messages. I also have code for receiving a notification any time someone edits Special:Mypage/talk if you would like to use that as your talk page.