As a disclaimer, I obviously don’t speak for DevRel or anyone but myself. But, I’m in constant communication with the Community Sages and was a member of the Community Post Approval team for most of its lifespan. As a result, I have a decent amount of insight into this discussion that nobody else has had so far.
I can get more into it if you want, but the gist is that the signal to noise ratio would be too high if members were given unrestricted reply access to feature requests. We found that members were very quick to grasp what was required in bug reports, but we also found that they often reported bugs that weren’t real. As a compromise, members were given permission to post replies on bug reports with no restriction, but not allowed to make topics to prevent not-bugs from being posted. The same wasn’t true of feature requests, so that compromise couldn’t be made.
In case you were wondering, we were getting over a thousand posts into Post Approval a month by the end of the program. The fact that the badge was only awarded to 600 people across the entire program’s existence should hopefully be informative.
This is a relic from back when the forum was effectively a private club – Lounge should probably be deleted, and it would never have come into existence under the current forum’s leadership.
While I do agree that replies to feature requests should be unlocked (at least until new system comes in place, I’m not THAT patient to wait for over a month), I don’t think that making new topics in PF and opening Lounge to members is a good idea. A lot of people would post bugs in their code to engine bugs, and there’s kind of a special atmosphere in Lounge that I don’t want to be ruined.
Since even discussion was fully unlocked to members, I see no point in feature requests’ replies to be locked.
Forum Feedback is for feature requests and bug reports for the Developer Forum so these address Developer Relations. This part of your response here is not desirable – let people give their opinion.
I don’t see what was wrong with the post approval system? I mean, Roblox makes a point to say that to become a regular; you must prove that you’re capable of creating well-made, constructive topics and discussion. How are we supposed to prove we’re capable of doing that if Members can barely post on the forum at all?
This is something we’ve gone over a number of times in threads related to the removal of Community Post Approval. If you’d like a summary:
Does not scale well. PA is a manual process and we had to sort through hundreds of messages every now and again. Largest backlog I’ve helped handle is 500+ messages.
Mentally exhausting. There was no quota to fulfill and if we weren’t constantly on the ball, then the inbox would fill right up and we’d have to go through all those requests sooner or later. CPA was comprised of volunteers. We don’t get paid to go through that inbox, we do it because we wanted to.
It’s better if paid staff handle these kinds of processes while encouraging us developers to focus on our own development and activities, not to cast away several hours digging through that inbox. Topping it off with impatience and negative language both on and off the forum for not going through the inbox made those hourly trade offs not too worth it.
There was enough wrong with PA. Change was requested and we volunteers followed up on our end. Developer Relations has not.
For your specific concern, please check out other threads discussing the removal of post approval and related responses about the mental burden it placed upon us.
tl1 users shouldn’t be able to do it on their own as it would result in chaos. The lack of communication from devrel is severely disheartening but there is still hope that we will get any response from them.
Good concept, bad attempt to fix it. You make it seem like everyone who is Regular are “entitled” and anyone who faces your post is “evil”, but that’s not true. Yes, they should be open but fighting like my parents (lol) isn’t really gonna fix it.
Regulars don’t use PA (Post Approval, which is gone) when they rank up. They also get access to #lounge.
Let’s say you look at someone’s rank and sees that it is Regular. They will think, “Oh, so that must mean they did a lot of contributions,” since to rank up to Regular, you needed to use PA a lot. It doesn’t matter about stats. Everybody gets this wrong for some reason.
It used to work like this. There was a major spam issue in the category, which is a big issue since the category is meant to be a resource to Roblox engineers and product to give a slice of what the developer community and userbase want from the platform.