So there’s a thread on /r/ROBLOX about Lua syntax errors not being shown in the script window. We have a thread about this same issue on the devforums. In that thread, a developer engaged with this community and informed us that this will be fixed.
But that’s not visible to anyone outside these forums. In fact, as I understand, under this forum’s policy on leaks, we’re not allowed to tell people it’s been discussed on devforums and is a known bug.
I understand that the ROBLOX developers might want, for instance, to get feedback on a possible future feature without building expectations in the larger community, but there’s tons of discussions on ROBLOX development and bug reports here that don’t feature anything secret, and nobody but us can read or even be told about it. And because staff understanably focus their efforts with regards to communicating about development on this forum, it can look to the larger community like ROBLOX doesn’t know about an issue or isn’t doing anything about it (see that reddit post for an example), when that’s really not the case. And this forum has also become the place of choice for its members to discuss Lua programming in general, with the effect that the resources in them have become inaccessible to the rest of the community.
In short, I just don’t see why a lot of things here should be secret.
I believe making a lot more of this community publicly visible (but still with restricted posting) would be of great use to the ROBLOX community, while still preserving this forum’s benefits as a place with a high signal-to-noise ratio for developers to communicate with themselves and staff about ROBLOX game development.
I think some of the categories should be publicly visible – anyone can see these categories, but only members can post on them still. We already handle the public category well enough that we’re allowed to post to it, so at this point it’s up to whether ROBLOX values carefully curated topics or making the devforums a useful tool usable by all, more in-line with its UGC nature and which will hopefully alleviate the issue of the devforums being viewed as some elitist, secretive group.
These are the most relevant to non-members:
Development Discussion/Platform Support: I have a problem and I’m looking for people who’ve already solved it
Cool Creations: I want to see and get inspiration from the amazing things developers on ROBLOX are making
Tutorials: I want to take advantage of the vast wealth of learning resources on the devforums
I’m sure ROBLOX would want to feature the best of the best tutorials though, so maybe Public Tutorials can be renamed “Featured Tutorials”
Bug Reports: I encountered a ROBLOX bug and am looking for workarounds from people who’ve previously encountered it
Maybe relevant:
Feature Requests
Should remain private:
Lounge: Too laid-back to be public
Inception: N/A to non-members
Nominations: Should be private
Moderation Review Requests: People’s personal moderation accounts not very applicable to others
We’d obviously have to crack down on profanity/etc, and we’d probably have to create new public categories so existing topics with profanity wouldn’t be visible, gradually moving in old topics hopefully. It wouldn’t be a cakewalk, but sharing the abundant knowledge and resources on the forums would be a tremendous help to the community.
One small warning here is that “What are you working on currently” is currently part of that forum, and maybe shouldn’t be public for reasons similar to the one I gave for ROBLOX features in my post.
(I think there’s already been some discussion on making that its own forum, and the issue was that it would dramatically increase thread volume with a lot of low-reply topics. I guess it could become a thread in its own forum with new topics restricted or something.)
I agree with the rest. I hadn’t thought about the difference in moderation standards that might require, but I can’t think of one issue we’ve had with it in all the time we’ve had a public category, and the wiki before that. (Speaking of which, everyone here ought to be able to edit that IMO).
I agree with @sncplay42 – we could partition those off into their own section. Placing them in Development Discussion is already rather weird as it is.
Probably outside of the bounds of what discord can offer, but it’d be neat if we could flag a post or thread for public display granted enough people considered it would be beneficial for to show for archival reasons.