Thread:Talk:Flow/Response to Quora question/reply (3)

This includes most of the points that annoy me about the current discussion "system" in mediawiki. There are a few things that I would add, though:
 * Thread-independent management. Have each thread be a single entity would allow watchlisting only the topics you care about, moving threads to more appropriate pages, and archiving without losing edit history, or, if archival is done via moving the page to preserve the edit history, without having to split the page at unnatural places (e.g. if organizing archives by year, the first posts of a still active thread near the end of the year will have to be copy-pasted back to the current page, losing history; if organizing archives by number of threads, reactivating a prematurely archived thread would require manual copy-paste and loss of history)
 * Native support for quoting. This is especially relevant for long messages, since inserting replies below parts of the original post break its flow and make it unclear who is writing what, and quoting templates are a hack that can't, for instance, link reliably to the original post being quoted.
 * Features for consensus-making. Wikipedia discussions can get quite big and it would be great to have a way to provide summaries for threads, and voting for individual posts, so people who come across a long discussion don't have to read the whole thing to make sure they're not repeating a point already made (and potentially addressed/resolved), or overlooking important points that should be taken into account. Voting would also make it easier to ignore low-vote posts if one's short on time, and allowing the best posts to be highlighted would even allow some form of summarizing to the thread.
 * Automatic signatures. Not only the tildes markup is unintuitive, it's also very easy to forget to sign, even for experienced editors.