This wiki does not have a typically broad set of forums because they would compete with the official forums at karma-lab.com. The two generally visible forums on the wiki are:
- A forum used to track article requests and the discussion for each request, found via the Request an article link in the top menu.
- A forum to provide support for questions using the wiki itself, found via support > support forum in the top menu.
The most important things to remember when managing forum threads and posts
Never delete a forum thread of any kind, including page discussions. You should never take action on a thread unless you know exactly what you are doing, because you can essentially break the forum engine by doing so.
Never modify any of the pages in the **Forum: namespace (category).** Doing so can also break the forums.
The only 100% safe action to perform with page discussion threads is to delete individual posts in a thread, as follows:
- At the bottom of the specific post, click the options link.
- From the new links that appear, click delete.
For more information, refer to Forums : Fixing Them over on the Wikidot Community Portal.
The two hidden forums
There are two forums that are generally hidden from view:
- The discussion page for each article are also forum threads in a hidden forum for per-page discussions. A discussion thread isn't actually created until somebody clicks discuss for that page and either posts the first comment or else blocks discussions on that page (which only an admin or moderator can do).
- A special Deleted Threads forum is used as a safe place to move unwanted public threads into. (The forum code doesn't like it when you actually delete a thread, so it's safer and easier to simply move the thread into this special forum.)
Members can see these hidden forums but cannot mess with them in any way. This is why our private admin discussion forums are on a different wiki altogether.
Guidelines for managing forum threads and article discussion threads
- If you need to delete a thread from the Per page discussions or Request an article forum for any reason, don't actually delete it! Instead, you should move it to the Deleted threads forum.
- When you manually block the discussion thread for a specific page (see below for more information), it creates a empty thread in the Per page discussions forum. (Normally a thread isn't created until somebody actually posts the first discussion comment to a page.) So it's not unusual to have some empty threads in this forum: that's a sign that discussions were manually blocked for that associated page.