The forums are great. It connects us developers using a lot of fantastic features. One of the most imperative features that define the forum experience is the “Likes” button. This allows people to show support for ideas and thoughts shared by other devs, or a way to express gratitude to Roblox when they post in the updates section.
The one thing that is missing from this functionality, however, is a way to show your stance against certain topics. For instance, the recent Roblox update allowing for a plugins marketplace. This was unpopular among some users (and I’m sure popular among others), but those users have no method of showing Roblox their stance in a quick, quantitative way - the only thing they can do is post a negative reply which sometimes is unnecessary.
I’m not suggesting dislikes to make the forums a negative place, but it would help guide Roblox engineers who listen to platform feedback channels what the entire thought of the community is. 400 likes on a post means nothing if 5000 disliked it! Anyways, I hope this request is considered. I think it would be beneficial to the community.
I feel like this kind of a thing can get quickly muddled and abused. As it is, we’ve previously had an issue with the flagging system (and possibly still do) wherein users maliciously abuse the flag system to hide certain posts. In terms of updates, I can see this quickly going south: as it is, feedback on current announcement threads without such a system existing is sometimes not that great. I’m talking about disliking updates without any legitimate reason.
Downvotes aren’t needed across the whole forum. In cases where feedback is required, you’ll typically see a thread posted that asks for feedback or a poll will be hosted. If that’s not enough, the Platform Feedback categories are there if you wish to convey things to engineering and/or the community. That relegates this feature to a fairly niche request.
For threads where downvoting has no utility, it can quickly become a tool that encourages negativity. I feel that our current system works fine enough: like posts that you agree with or leave the post be. If you have a disagreement to express, you can do so respectfully in a response to the thread or privately with the user.
I believe this is more beneficial for engineers than a dislike button. If the community doesn’t like a change, engineers will want to know why. If someone already mentioned why they don’t like it and you agree with them, hit the like button on their reply.
The likes on negative replies can act as dislike buttons for the topic, but containing a reason for the dislikes.
I really dont think this would be a useful feature. Even though being able to show a dislike of a topic/idea by pressing a button sounds good on paper, it doesn’t tell the person who got their post disliked why the person didn’t like the post. Comments are already on the forum and can give an infinitely greater amount of information than what a small dislike ever could.
I disagree with you, but understand where you’re coming from. At the end of the day this is a platform to express yourself, your ideas and your thoughts with thousands of other people, however it is not a platform to pressure people, make them feel unwelcome or hate on them. Nothing should be classed as solely a bad build.
Instead (as we have now) the community can simply reply leaving constructive criticism which will help the developer improve next time. I understand however there may be a need for this from staff posts announcing new features, however I revert to my previous comment - if you have a real issue with a new feature then reply saying what it is and what may need to be changed.
Simply clicking a dislike button does 0 for the developer and other members of the community, how can he/she specifically know what’s the downfall of their model? - If it is introduced it will make the forum a very negative place and people may be afraid to share ideas!
Adding a downvote button won’t benefit anyone or anything. It can and will be abused (either by brigading [aka “downvote en masse just to cause disruption”] or bullying [downvoting all of a specific user’s posts just to harass them]).
Remember people using flags as a weapon? That’s what you’re going to get with downvote. Except with more room for damage, and maybe upvote/downvote wars.
I agree, but dislikes is much better than polls. Feedback is an idea I still agree with 100%. Downvotes may get abused using bots, but it’s not that worrying. Roblox Corp. is responsible as:
It’s their platform.
2: They should be getting rid of the bots.
3: It’s their platform, not our’s so even if we caused it they are still responsible. They created Roblox and it’s Forums in the first place.
As I said, their responsibility. Not ours. They should be fixing it.
While I strongly agree that a dislike system is totally unnecessary and we’re better off without it to prevent damaging or mindless negativity, I’d like to address a relative issue. Now, I am fully aware that I have less experience within the community than you but I’d like to believe that devs who can influence the audience of this platform through their games are capable of exercising a decent level of responsibility.
So I’m kinda saying that this statement is quite accusatory but if this can be inferred from the current behavior of the community then maybe a better action would be to implement a stricter membership system. I don’t have a clear thought or suggestion about it and it’ll be more resource intensive but it could be a better step for the community.
I disagree with you, just because it is their platform does not mean they should be responsible for unintended / user produced malicious content. There would also be no point banning the bots, they can easily reword their phrases to become exempt from what ever filtering scripts there may be. It’s not their fault that there is bots on the platform, you pretty much get that anywhere and everywhere anyway. It cannot be fixed and even if it was there would still be a minority of maliciously intended bots lurking around these sections of the platform.
I think the likes button will stay the same, no dislike buttons. As Colbert said it can easily be abused by bots. I also wouldn’t see the need for one anyway, we have the flagging system as it is. If users decide to post content it is usually flagged for its’ appropriate reason. This is a place for users to collaborate, help and share knowledge regarding the Roblox platform. There wouldn’t be a need for the dislike button as the only thing to dislike would probably not be related or may break forum rules.
Dislikes are simply pointless. The point of the forums is to offer useful, constructive criticism and help to other developers. A simple dislike usually does not accomplish that.
A like or a dislike isn’t really an opinion on its own. Likes just enforce another opinion.
If an opinion you share hasn’t been posted to a topic already, you should post it. You should use Likes if your opinion was already posted and you want to enforce it.
Dislikes are a bad idea, because there’s no reasoning attached to them. You should instead just Like the alternate opinion already posted to the topic as a reply, or make this reply yourself so that others can support it with Likes. This is much more constructive than just a dislike count, the latter of which is pretty useless information.
I’m someone who hate dislikes, even if it’s not my post. That’s why instead of dislikes you can reply and say that you dont like this post. Well, this doesn’t even make sense don’t liking a post, cause posts actually are morefrom helping, how you would dislike a post where someone is asking for help. Right now i don’t agree your idea.
Yeah I see where you guys are coming from in the sense that it could be abused against people, however the possibility of that happening is pretty low, and since there is a long process to be admitted to the dev forum, it would be impossible to leave more than one biased down vote per angered person bent against you (for lack of a better term lol).
The other reason I brought this up is because sometimes people don’t have the time to write a full reply for their disagreement, or they disagree but not strongly enough search the comments for an argument they do agree with or write a full reply.
Alternatively, it could be enabled but only on certain posts if the author of the post enables it. Downvotes would give a more precise reading of where the community stands on certain issues. I don’t think it will hurt anyone’s feelings to learn that some random user disagrees with their idea.
It’s their platform, not ours. It’s not “our fault”.
Dislike buttons are a way better way than voting polls or spamming the chat with Yes or No just to fill people’s notifications, it can be abused and probably will be abused by bots. That’s what Roblox should be removing though.
I didn’t say “our fault”, I said that it was then original creators fault. Just because it is their platform doesn’t mean that they should be held responsible for malicious content which is user generated.
Granted, they can assist with that but polls are usually used for #resources:community-resources and #resources:community-tutorials. Polls are used as a form of feedback, having dislike buttons would be pointless because they would only be used there.
I do not think that has ever happened, the chances of that happening are very scarce anyway as the influx of new members is pretty good at identifying what’s human and what is not.
You’re a little on the past in that regard. Gaining entry into the DevForum is as simple as spending some time of your day being active in reading posts.
Downvotes have little to no utility centered on a forum intended for learning or giving depth feedback which is ultimately helpful for everyone, especially engineers when it comes to new updates and the Platform Feedback category. Where a number speaks no words, a reason for disagreement and likes on that post can cause discussion to arise internally about something.
If, by some miracle, there was a good reason as to why downvotes should exist, then it should first be proven that users are capable of being able to provide constructive feedback, not quantitative, when it comes to threads, because a user’s voice speaks more than a button and a number do. Seeing as announcement and report threads often have posts merged out or get locked, that seems like a far fetched prospect in itself.
If you don’t have the time to write a reply about your disagreement, don’t post it because your post isn’t contributing anything useful if you aren’t willing to shell out time to explain your disagreement and encourage discussion. Search for a post that you resonate with and add a heart to it.
As for allowing thread authors to enable downvotes… that’s what polls are for. They allow you to add detail to your query and the choices users can make other than a pointless yes or no.
Sorry for bumping post, but I recently had negative user experience with this feature on discord forum.
I think, that dislike button is discussion killer for 2 reasons:
When there is downvote button on help topic, it is the worse idea ever because the thing, that are help topics made for is that the user don’t have idea how to do something, so he asks. No matter of the question, it’s at least little useful. And noobs have got problem with easy things, but every pro was noob.
On feature requests, it isn’t that much bad idea as on help topics, but it’s also bad, because it’s easier to press the button, than write reply. So when there aren’t so many viewers on the topic, there can be only dislikes and not any reply. For example, on the discord forums, I wrote a feature request, but I just got likes/dislikes (and my score was -2), but I don’t know, why they did not like it. And same for #updates:announcements. The dislike button is so easy to press, that there will be less comments, so roblox will not know what to improve.
Personally, I think, that it will be better, when roblox will make topic before doing some controversial change and put there pros/cons and yes/no poll.