Only Developer Forum feature requests should be posted here. Use #feature-requests for Roblox-related feature requests.
As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to stay engaged and motivated when using the DevForum due to its lackluster and dull design. The current interface, with its minimal color scheme and basic icons, fails to capture the dynamic and creative spirit that embodies the Roblox developer community.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my experience using the forum because a more vibrant and visually appealing design would create an inviting and stimulating environment. This enhancement would not only make the forum more enjoyable to use but also reflect the innovative nature of Roblox development.
fostering greater creativity and enthusiasm among developers. Enhanced icons and a colorful layout would facilitate better user interaction and retention, making the forum a more effective tool for collaboration and learning.
It would also help distinguishing topics for which categories, it’s much harder to read which topic is for which category since there are tiny little icons below that say which is for which.
I do believe that, between 1 and 3 years ago, there were additional Discourse theme options available for users to choose on the DevForum - however, I suspect that there were a few reasons why most of them were removed:
Discourse themes and theme-components are not universally supported on all browser or device types - for example, many themes that make use of blur effects may not properly render or may result in performance issues on lower-end devices, certain browsers, and older devices. As a result, they may result in bug reports being made that are outside of Roblox’s scope of responsibilities to handle - reducing the ability of the staff maintaining the Forum to do so as effectively as they can right now.
Discourse themes and theme-components almost always increase the amount of information that needs loaded to load the forum - increasing network load and load times.
As almost all sources for themes are external open-source repositories, Roblox cannot ensure that they will remain up-to-date and usable as updates occur, leaving them to either repair code they did not write or remove them when they break - overall increasing the amount of maintenance required for the DevForum.
Given that there are currently at least 227 themes available for Discourse, it would likely be difficult to pick specific ones for DevForum that wouldn’t leave users unhappy with what is excluded.
Discourse, as is, remains far from the easiest software in existence to reliably host and add modifications onto - especially when run in a containerized environment.
Although I think that there can be and should be additional themes, in a manner such as how there once were, I feel that this is something that, if done, needs to be handled in a cautious manner in order to not reduce the quality of the forum in the process.
Maybe I should’ve been more clear, I am not asking for extra themes. Just to give the default light theme more vibrancy and what not, similiar to the old roblox website we had back in 2017/2018.
I understand dark mode not having much of this because well… it’s dark mode.
It’s definitely not impossible to have a more interesting dark theme available - however, I am unsure if Roblox would choose to put in the level of resources needed for that. As is, most full themes for Discourse are no longer actively maintained, with the ones that would be the biggest improvements over the status quo here being custom ones - such as the Epic Games Developer Forum, which has a stunning layout and accented background.
Unfortunately, making such a complex theme is incredibly time-intensive, and necessitates active maintenance of it whenever there are updates that would otherwise break it. Considering that the Developer Forum for Roblox is functional enough as is, I doubt that such a drastic measure will be taken - although I’d love to be proven wrong.
It is worth knowing that the existing themes here on the Roblox DevForum are, to my knowledge, all custom - but they are more so focused on usability, performance, and readability than aesthetics.
Similiar to the old roblox website, perfectly captures the community of roblox. I would like the forum website to also capture the community of developers more.
The only theme that Roblox has made themselves currently is Roblox Dark. Light, Dark, and Grey Amber aren’t made or maintained by Roblox. There were other themes, but they got removed because they started to break, anyways, besides the point.
You’re, as far as I can tell, basically just asking Roblox to go back on about 8 years of design iteration for the look of Roblox because it’s not personally stimulating enough for you. That’s really not the goal of the forums, to be stimulating for the sake of retention. They’re tools. I also understand that you generally aren’t supposed to provide solutions for problems in these reports, but you’re really not clear what you mean by stuff like “Enhanced icons.” How do you enhance a reply button, or a bell button, for example?
So yeah, just kinda seems like you want an Old Roblox theme, from the image you provided, which is really not gonna happen. I will say, the current Roblox Dark theme is definitely more stimulating than the default Light and Dark themes, and is more colorful than the current Roblox main site theme which is kind of outdated now (though, I personally still prefer it).
Also worth noting that pinning everything on “investors” is a trend a lot of Roblox players do and it’s really not needed in this situation. Roblox made a lot of these controversial theming changes, like removing a good amount of the colors besides shades of black and white, in 2018 and 2019, years before they went public.
That snipshot was just an example because I couldn’t find anything closer. But not just the old type, I would also like new changes too. New colors and what not.
Also I changed the title because I understand it was a bit confusing.
By the way I usually don’t want to pin this on roblox trying to be corporate or anything but what more can I say? I guess the other idea is that they wanna appeal to more people rather than looking like a little lego game and look more like other engines.
The website just looks really bland at the moment, atleast in 2017/2018 the vibrancy was still there even if it was close to getting removed.
You’re still missing the point that the forums kinda have to match the current design principles of Roblox’s modern UI because they are currently integrating into the larger Create page. It’s not like 4+ years ago where the DevForums had basically no connection to the main site besides log-in and so it didn’t really matter what it looked like.
You’re also still not really clear on what and where “more color, vibrancy, and better icons” means, what’s wrong with the current icons and colors, and why it would actually benefit the forums, besides “it’s boring currently.” You can’t just say “As a Roblox Developer, I’m bored” and turn it into a legitimate issue that’s making it hard for you to use the forums as a development tool. That it doesn’t capture some idealized concept of the developing spirit is not enough.
I’d like to add to this, instead of having to look closely at the bottom of a section at the tiny green or red icon. Why not make the icons bigger or more easy to notice?
Or make them particularly appealing, such as 3D icons.
We used to have some fun themes and to be honest I’d like to see more readded. Vincent was for sure my favorite but they purged almost all of the themes one day and we’ve been stuck with flat ones ever since.
I think we could benefit from a user themes option where you can implement your own themes if you want because Discourse themes are generally scss and JS which is a bit hard to get unless you compile it yourself.
Themes like that actually cost lots of money from design companies. Discourse themselves offer this but only on their “enterprise” plan which is probably way more than it costs for Roblox to keep a couple of engineers around and host it on their own hardware.
Thanks for posting about this. I wanted to let you know I’ve forwarded this internally to our design team. No immediate plans to make changes here so far, and it’s unlikely this will be addressed on a short time frame over other on-going projects, but we’ve seen the feedback!
Only Developer Forum feature requests should be posted here. Use #feature-requests for Roblox-related feature requests.
