Ok, so recently there has been some talk about announcements with the replies with users either:
A. spamming irrelevance such as ‘thanks’ and ‘awesome update’.
B. asking questions.
Now I’m not going to say either of these are bad, they are both positive behaviours which should be encouraged, however at the same time a thanks is more meaningful if it is not a public ordeal and therefor would be equally appreciated as a DM to those who contributed to the update meaning that a reply saying thanks is technically spam, however thats en entire different point then the one I want to discuss.
The point I wish to discuss is problem B, where often there can be 100s of replies asking the same couple of questions with original questions being drowned out, this is both going to result in bad interacting between developers and roblox and may result in problems further down the line if those problems are not addressed early on.
So naturally given the fact forum feedback was closed meaning this can no longer be a discussion, I have two proposals on how this issue could be rectified:
A. Announcement replies should be completely closed to everyone (including regulars) and an ‘FAQ’ / ‘Q&A’ type thing is added at the bottom of each announcement, this should contain predictable questions and their answers, with further questions being submitted via DM to the OP.
This is most likely the solution I favour the most since I don’t really feel that any reply really contributes to the topic in annoucnments
B. Announcements replies should remain open to all forum users, however as in option A a ‘FAQ’ / ‘Q&A’ type thing should be added to answer questions as they are asked in replies, this should also naturally contain predictable questions.
While I have noticed this on a few recent announcements showing a definite shift in the right direction, I believe one of these should become standard across all new announcement posts to try and maintain the order of one of the most important categories on the forum.
Solution A is a bad idea, because sometimes people will have questions that the community can answer faster than the OP, and some of the DMs might be left unanswered, whether purposefully or accidentally.
This means that the question will more likely be answered in the thread itself.
This is something that DevRel/DET should be able to control. This shouldn’t really be a problem. Ideally, I’d say that a separate group for such questions should be created so they won’t be left unanswered.
I’m pretty sure a FAQ for announcements is already a thing, and Ideally should be. Personally, I think if Roblox want’s to gather feedback, or even potential questions, they should do it via a survey, or some other external method. Then look for commonly-asked questions and add it to the FAQ. This way, you wouldn’t rely entirely on DM’s.
Not always the case though. There always a few questions that aren’t addressed on the thread, and usually some highly knowledgeable individual answers it.
More so my issues with announcements has been every time there is an announcement the community doesn’t agree upon, we just get hundreds of essentially the same whining on a post without much original thought. More so, certain users will post multiple times, the same sentiment, as a reply to multiple users. They treat the topic almost as a YouTube Comment section where they think they need to reply to each person for them to see it.
And if you are unsure about this idea, or think it doesn’t exist/happen, look no further than the clothing update announcement.
Further down the thread there was a staff response update to the outrage but it’s nearly impossible to find when it’s covered top to bottom with just “I hate this update” or “I’m mad at Roblox about this.”
After the staff response there are hundreds of responses that don’t make any sense in the context to the staff response. The staff member noted that the change wasn’t for fixing clothing bots but people still parade onward claiming that was the number one reason for the change. Its not.
I wish it was that easy. I’ve sent DMs to the OP of many announcements asking a question, I’ve yet to hear a response. People ignore their DMs. If their was a fair system, I’d be all for it.
Close announcement replies to DevForum new members.
Perhaps create a program (similar to how DevRel does their surveys) to submit questions and give trusted members (such as Top Contributors) access to it. Users can submit questions through this program, and if someone answers it both the question and the reply will be displayed on a page. Users will look through the page before submitting a question.
Maybe make announcement posts/stats not count? I feel like some people reply just to get a quick stat boost to help them rank up.
Unfortunately in announcements this rule doesn’t appear to be enforced, of course however this is an alternate solution if dev rel were willing to start to consider these posts as spam.
It is. But people need to flag the offending posts. The problem becomes that there are so many offending posts that people stop bothering trying to help police it.
If you want what would be replies to be directly added to the topic, how could it be any more contributive? You can’t contribute much more to a topic than bringing up something that’s worth adding to the OP.
I get the idea you’re getting across, but Top Contributor wasn’t meant to be a mark of trustworthiness. Regardless, it’s also gone at this point, so it’s a bit moot.
Without complaining about how dev rel handle flags, it is evident that from the posts which are flagged a lot less get taken down for spam in announcements then in other categories, part of this may just be adopted normalities however I don’t think not enough flags is exactly the issue.
In my view, announcement replies should be disabled and those with questions or who want to delve a little deeper can move over to a linked FAQ topic. This would be a megathread with the OP being updated to answer all (sensible) questions. Then people can leave their inquiries in the replies.
This way removes the clutter from announcements. And as I’ve seen recently to be in higher demand, it allows a non-dev friendly topic to outline new features.
I think a mix of solution A and B is the best option, something like what they are already doing in some posts where they close the main thread and move the discussion to another one.
The FAQ is already a thing, sadly there is one thing new members seem to dislike: read. They do not read the FAQ of the forum itself, they do not read the rules and the do not read the guidelines, that’s one of the main reasons why the category is spammed
Hey folks, will be closing this one out since the suggestion compromises on the accessibility of Announcements/Updates which we don’t want to pursue.
We acknowledge that it’s hard to get the general gist of these high-traffic topics and that questions/answers may be hard to see in there. We’ll need to look into how we can solve that better so it’s easier to see trends of feedback and make higher-quality responses more visible. We don’t have an interest however in blocking anyone from posting, adding extra steps on where to post, or moderating the responses more heavily.
Thanks for the feedback and I encourage you to post about specific problems you are having in the future along the How to post a Feature Request template.