Add a "Roblox staff filter" to announcements to highlight staff posts

As a developer I want to get the important information on an announcement as quickly as possible.

If Roblox added a way to filter posts in a thread to the staff group (Roblox_Staff), or somehow highlight them even more, I could easily see replies of staff accounts to an announcement without needing to scroll through a sea of noise scanning for staff icons. It would be respectful of my time as a mature developer on this platform.

I feel this feature is specifically useful on this forum over Discourse in general because other Discourse forums do not seem to have this problem to this degree, so it is unlikely that Discourse will prioritize implementing this / even including this in the main repo.

EDIT: I’m aware there is a search option that takes group membership info, but this is slower than scrolling through the topic.

40 Likes

Even though you can always ctrl+f the staffs name, I think this isn’t a terrible idea. Whenever a new typed lua topic arrives, I find a hard time trying to fetch information throughout the replies. Perhaps a button that when clicked will show you the next reply made by that certain user. In facebook they have this feature in groups, where if you click on a person’s pfp, it shows you all the replies he made in that group (in our case, the topic).

Doesn’t Discourse have a summarize feature for threads that hides the less relevant replies? But I see yours being a little more specific thus more useful.

Oh my god yes. I can’t tell you the struggle it is just to read an entire announcement post so I can stay informed.

4 Likes

Most of the time there are teams of 2-5 engineers working on a feature who may all participate in the topic – so there might be more than one account responding.

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This kind of exists:

image

Result:

image

However it doesn’t answer the OP because

2 Likes

I feel an alternate solution is handling replies similarly to categories such as bug reports, in which any reply that doesn’t actually contribute anything meaning full such as a bug or genuine question should be flagged as spam, for example , ‘Wow, great update!’ or an example of something someone quickly made with the feature are all spam in my opinion and contribute nothing meaningful.

1 Like

I think this is a easy way to do it through the server’s total, though if it was added it may go across all categories.
There was a post on meta about it but I can’t seem to find it anywhere.

This is still relevant, I basically mute every announcement after the first 10 posts. This leads to me missing any important staff information that might be posted to the topic as a reply. There’s too much noise in these announcements and too little filtering/sorting.

3 Likes

I understand you would want a way to only see Roblox staff replies, but would something like highlighting staff replies using the Discourse highlighter be one step in the right direction? I find that some code like this in an extension does the trick.

code
setInterval(() =>
{
	for (let post of document.getElementsByTagName("article"))
	{
		if (post.parentElement.classList.contains("group-Roblox_Staff"))
		{
			if (post.parentElement.classList.contains("moderator"))
			{
				continue
			}
	
			post.parentElement.className += " moderator"
		}
	}
}, 100)
1 Like

Why don’t you use Devforum +? It’s a great open source chrome extension. It highlights all staff posts using a similar method to what @sjr04 wrote.

I don’t think I trust the author and based on the README that extension has some toxic features, not going to support that in any way.

Moreover, this should be an official devforum feature. I’m not asking for a workaround or extension. This should come out of the box on this forum.

2 Likes

I don’t disagree, however knowing the way our forum runs, chances are a workaround is the only way this will come to life as of now. I would also like this built in, but I doubt this will see the light of day.