Developer Forum Users' Guide

Forum Help
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#1

This thread is designed to serve as a dump for useful information regarding RBXDev for both new and current members. If you have any additional information that you think should be in this guide, post it in response to this thread and tag me using Discord mentions.

In the future, this guide may be made a wiki so that other users can contribute to its content.

You can open a menu of keyboard shortcuts by pressing Shift + / (also known as “?”).


Formatting

It’s important to note that your post will not always look the way it does in the Preview Post area.

Discourse has many useful features pertaining to posting. Most of these should be pretty clear - bold, italics, quotes, adding links, uploading files, lists, etc. There are many more features that aren’t shown on the bar above posts, though. We’re able to use basic HTML elements!

Here are some examples of useful HTML elements for formatting posts:

<strike>text</strike> = text
<s>text</s> = text
<small>text</small> = text
<ins>text</ins> = text
<u>text</u> = text
<sub>text</sub> = text
<sup>text</sup> = text
<big>text</big> = text
<br> will give you a single line break.
&nbsp; will give you a double line break.

Adjusting the size of the font can also be accomplished by the following:
# at the beginning of the line will make your text really, really big
## at the beginning of the line will make your text not quite as big
Adding # from that point on will decrease the size to the point where you can post some pretty small text.

To post code, you can surround it with three backticks, like this:

print(asdfghjkl)

That shows as

in the editor. You can also specify what language your code is written in:

   ```language-name
   code


For example: 
```python
def DoStuff():
    """ Does stuff """
    while True:
        print("this will output forever!")

is Python code syntactically highlighted. (thank you digpoe)

The full list of supported languages is here: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/tree/master/lib/highlight_js/assets/lang (credit to fractality_alt)


Spoilers

Users who were around when RBXDev used to be on Kunena probably remember spoiler tags. These aren’t present on Discourse, but since we’ve got access to basic HTML elements, we can replicate them with the following:

<details>
   <summary>
      Title
   </summary>
   Content
</details>
*note indentation does matter

Spoilers are useful for large images, gifs, and anything else that shouldn’t be automatically shown in posts. When RBXDev was running Kunena software, images were mostly put in Spoiler tags for the convenience of users who view RBXDev on their mobile devices to save data (this is no longer applicable).

Worth noting: To replicate this a bit easier, you can go to the Gear icon (next to the smiley face icon) in the text editor and select the applicable effect.

Polls

Every once in a while, you might want to post a poll for other members of RBXDev to respond to. Discourse has really nice poll features. You can check it out here. Discourse supports multiple-choice limited option polls, multiple-choice polls, single choice polls, and the ability to put multiple polls in a single post. The post owner or a staff member can close the poll at any time.

Mentions

You can mention other users of the forums in threads you think they would be able to contribute much to or that they should see. To do so, just use the following syntax: @username. There are many examples of this in the guide itself.

Tutorials

In RBXDev, we have the opportunity to learn from others and teach others what we’ve already mastered via the Tutorials section. If you have knowledge that you think could benefit others, please don’t hesitate to write up a useful guide. Here are some rules your tutorials should probably abide by in order to be useful:

  • Your tutorials should be clear and concise. It’s imperative that users understand why something works, but it’s also important that they’re able to actually get it working in the first place.
  • Keep in mind that not everyone is as knowledgeable on the topic as you are. Your tutorial should be written at a level so that even those without background knowledge of the subject should be able to benefit from your tutorial.
  • Keep spelling and grammatical errors to a minimum - this ties in with being clear and concise. If nobody can understand what you’re saying, your tutorial isn’t benefiting anyone.
  • Provide all of the code necessary to replicate the finished product of the tutorial. Your tutorial’s no good if people can’t use it because of code they don’t have access to.
  • Keep your guides as jargon-free as possible. Not everyone understands technical terms, nor do they need to in order to have a script working fine.
  • Keep the content relevant. Readers will have a difficult time with your tutorial if you’re bringing up irrelevant matter.

EchoReaper has made a thread for Tutorial Requests & Bounties, meaning you can actually make Robux off of well-written and helpful tutorials that are requested within the thread and listed in the first post, alongside their bounty rewards.


Rules

It’s absolutely important that you read the rules of the forums before you post. Being unfamiliar with the rules could lead to misunderstandings, punishments, and whatnot. You can find the full list of Developer Forum rules here:



Where to post

What section does my post belong in!? It’s a question that plagues the best of us from time to time and nobody’s really going to judge you for posting in the wrong section. We’re supposed to be a mature forum, after all. Here’s a helpful guide for where your post belongs:

  • My post is about ROBLOX.
    • My post is about an aspect of development on ROBLOX.
      → Development Discussion
    • My post is about a feature on ROBLOX that I would like.
      → Feature Requests
  • My post is about a bug on ROBLOX.
    → Bug Reports
  • My post is about my friend’s ROBLOX ban
    → Lounge
  • My post is about my own ROBLOX ban.
    → Lounge
  • My post is about an asset of mine that was deleted on ROBLOX.
    → Moderation Review Requests
  • My post doesn’t match any of the above.
    → Lounge

  • My post is not about ROBLOX.
    • My post is to nominate someone for RBXDev or to nominate a game for featured sort.
      → Nominations (and appropriate subcategory)
    • My post is about RBXDev itself.
      → Inception Forum
  • My post is anything else.
    → Lounge

Remember: When in doubt, post it in the Lounge. If it’s not the right category, a staff member will move it (or you can move it yourself by editing the initial post)

Also remember: The Moderation Review Requests forum is only for moderation concerning your own assets, account, etc. It’s not a place to appeal your friends’ bans or ask for action to be taken against other users. If you feel that a user needs to be moderated, use the Report Abuse buttons on the site.

Bug Reports

Please follow the thread posted by CodeWriter in order to report bugs. It contains useful information as well as parameters for critical bug reports.

Quotes

[quote=“EchoReaper”]If you’re replying to someone, you can click “Quote Whole Post” to have Discourse create the quote for you, syntax and all:

1350×740 465 KB

Particularly useful since if you try to highlight a whole post and click “quote”, it doesn’t pick up some syntax like bullet lists, images, etc.
[/quote]

In addition to that, you can highlight text in a post and you’ll get the option to “quote reply”, which will quote the selected text in a new response.

Tags

Tags are a bit more trivial, yet we still see misuse cases on RBXDev from time to time. Obviously, a post in the Development Discussion section is going to be about development - there’s no need to put “development” as a tag. If your thread is about, for example, discussion of optimal techniques for doing something with CSG to have as few triangles and be as efficient as possible, you could certainly tag “csg”, “efficiency”, “triangles”. Those would be reasonable tags for such a thread. The tags for this guide, for example, are “guide”, “helpful”, “meta”, and “rbxdev”. A general rule of thumb would be that your post probably doesn’t need to have any more than 3-5 tags.

Navigation

The ease of navigation and the appearance of a forum are always major factors in its activity and organization. Default Discourse looks messy and it’s hard to notice where things begin and where they end - and it’s waaaay too white. That’s okay, because we live in the 21st century. We’ve got the technology to fix it locally. For the more experienced user, just grab a Chrome or Firefox extension/plugin that allows you to change the CSS of the site. For example, Stylebot for Chrome and Stylish for Firefox are both popular CSS editors. If you’re not too familiar with CSS, or you’re just lazy, you can absolutely use themes already created by @Anaminus here. Or you can just roll with default Discourse. Maybe you just like the default look, and that’s absolutely fine.

That concludes this guide for now. Again, if you have more to contribute, reply to this thread with whatever it is you believe would be helpful to help others adjust to RBXDev’s layout, style, and to format their posts like a pro.

Thanks,
Lilly

26 Likes
Forum Functions
We need an FAQ and/or introduction for new members
What are you working on currently? [2016]
So no confidential tags?
So no confidential tags?
So no confidential tags?
Beginner Roblox Lua Tutorial
What are you working on currently? [2016]
#2
#4

Small comment: the non-summary part of a details tag is still loaded together with the page, so this is not applicable anymore. I don’t think there’s a way for us to stop data from being loaded immediately now.

1 Like
#5

Thanks, I edited to clarify this.

#6

Spoilers didn’t prevent data from loading on Kunena either – they were just there to make it easier to navigate down the page without having big images bloating the vertical size of the page.

A little more on tags. The uses of tags are as follows:

  • Giving users a glimpse into what the thread is about on the Latest page
  • Helping find the thread in a search
  • An alternative way of categorizing topics than official categories (you can find a list of all tags here (menu button > Tags as well) and find a list of all related topics with that tag)

The “guide” tag used in this thread is redundant for #1 and #2 because it’s in the name which shows up in searches and on Latest, but it’s useful for #3 because after more threads with that tag are posted, you’ll be able to go to the Tags page and pull up a list of all guides on this forum (assuming they used that tag). On the other hand, “RBXDev” isn’t really necessary because it’s in the title and it isn’t very helpful as a categorization tool – the same with “meta”, as that’s what the Inception forum implies (discussion about the forums themselves). As a rule of thumb, you shouldn’t create a tag unless you can imagine it being used frequently in the future (tags only used a handful of times will just bloat the Tags page later down the line when we have tons of tags that have been created) and unless it helps narrow down what you’re looking for.

2 Likes
#7

Oh, I know one. If you’re replying to someone, you can click “Quote Whole Post” to have Discourse create the quote for you, syntax and all:

1350×740 465 KB

Particularly useful since if you try to highlight a whole post and click “quote”, it doesn’t pick up some syntax like bullet lists, images, etc.

Edit: (oops I replied to buildthomas because I had opened the “add reply” in response to him so I could use the “quote whole post”)

#8

Interesting. I didn’t know about that! Still a bit useless though, because we can just select the parts we want to quote and hit the ‘Quote Reply’ button:

#9

Try highlighting and quoting the image in that post you quoted or the bullet list / clickable link in the previous one. It won’t preserve its syntax.

#10

Unfortunately, it doesn’t. I don’t particularly think images should be quoted though

#11

But if you do want to quote images, bullet lists, clickable links, etc you’ll be able to with quote whole post and then selectively removing the bits you don’t want.

#12

Edited to include @EchoReaper’s Tutorial Requests & Bounties thread.

1 Like
#13

Hey Lilly, the OP lacks the code formatting. Can you add that to the formatting section please?

1 Like
#14

Thanks, added!

1 Like
#15

You should mention that you can add the language it’s in too:

   ```language-name
   code

(If you add a space before the code in the \`\`\` block you can prevent markdown from parsing it.)
For example:
```text
   ```python
   def DoStuff():
       """ Does stuff """
       while True:
           print("this will output forever!")

Which would render as:
```python
def DoStuff():
    """ Does stuff """
    while True:
        print("this will output forever!")

I’m not sure of the list of supported languages, though.

2 Likes
#16

Supported languages are listed on this page.

2 Likes
#17

Thanks guys. Updated the guide with the changes to code formatting.

#18

You’re missing the superscript text example

1 Like
#19

Worth noting:

Spoiler format requires being spaced away from other text.

Example:

qwerty
<details>
<summary> Title</summary>
Content
</details>

will not show as intended - instead, the Content area will show outside of the spoiler.

The following, however, will work:

qwerty

<details>
<summary> Title</summary>
Content
</details>

due to the empty line between “qwerty” and the <details> tag.

Also worth noting:

You can use ###### before a line to make it smaller font. Editing OP now with this information.

3 Likes
#20

I was wondering what was going on with the RBXDev Offices thread, now it is fixed. Thanks.

1 Like
#21

I just discovered this as I was fixing one of the public tutorials. Really took me by surprise, I had no idea.

1 Like