As a developer it is extremely painful to browse the forum when it quite literally gets vandalized by immature forum users.
When Roblox is down, the forum should either be completely locked down or put on a heavy slow-mode state. Roblox already puts site-wide banners on the forum when outages occur, so there should be no excuse for someone to be oblivious to the situation. The amount of misinformation that spreads during outages is extremely harmful. Flagging isn’t helping here either – the vandalism outnumbers moderation resources. I also won’t be surprised if the flags have backlogged, especially if some staff couldn’t log into their accounts because of the outage, therefore being less of them to help out.
There shouldn’t be any downsides, as Roblox engineers already have tools so they can be made aware of any outages.
If Roblox did this, this would help everyone including forum moderation, as there would be less vandalism on the forum.
The majority of misinformation about outages is not spread on the forums, it leaks to here from other “sources”… The point of forums is for discussion. If nearly 72 hours of downtime from a billion dollar company isn’t worth discussion then idk… Speculation is just that, speculation anyone that believes speculation without any evidence then that’s honestly their problem that they lack the common sense necessary and are as gullible as they are. The fact is that large creators, reddit and other platforms spread this misinformation to a much wider user base to the younger, more gullible, audience.
At the very least they should provide a megathread that all discussion about it is directed to and have automoderation delete and hide posts relating to it that are not within the megathread.
There’s been so much misinformation that people have been bringing to the communities that I manage from here. It’s been almost impossible to keep the peace since people would start spamming links to discussions that have been happening here. In some cases, people had to be blacklisted from posting devforum & twitter links.
It really isn’t worth discussing. It always brings more harm than good. Best to talk about it after we get the facts of what happened here.
I mean this is obviously going to happen no matter what. We’re on a platform that has a majority of children here. No one teaches kids to not believe everything they see unfortunately.
In most cases I’ve seen, those are just memes that people are stupid enough to take as fact. I do agree with the fact that people don’t really think about their reach. I think Clonetrooper out of all people found this one out the hard way.
Oh my god, after seeing the ridiculous amounts of posts saying “Roblox is down! What are you doing?” and, now that it’s back up “Roblox is up! What are you doing?” that somehow are perfectly fine by DET standards, despite them being completely against rules AND duplicates of duplicates of duplicates, I’ve genuinely given up all hope that the devforum is supposed to be a professional place for actual development related posts.
I am genuinely seething. They really don’t care anymore, do they.
I wouldn’t consider it “vandalism” being caused by “immature” forum users. I believe that the issues are because you aren’t forced to read the rules in order to make a post. Getting onto the forum and getting permission to make topics is very easy. However, you’re not forced at all to read the rules at all, especially when you have to click on multiple topics in order to see everything about the DevForurm. I didn’t even read the rules or see the introductory thread when I first joined because I just saw “we’ve promoted you to New Member” and stopped reading past that point.
For each category, I would suggest forcing members to read about what is and isn’t allowed in a certain category and preventing posting for maybe 10 minutes. For example, if you make a new topic in Development Resources, a box would appear showing examples of what would be considered a valid topic and what isn’t. If you go to Development Discussion, another box would doing the same. This would most likely lead to less irrelevant topics and therefore a better quality DevForum experience both while Roblox is and is not down.
I 100% agree with you. I have flagged much more posts than my daily average during the outage, the bunch of vandalism & off-topic posts were growing a lot.
Developer Discussion has always been ambiguous and it’s never completely sure whether or not a post is off-topic, but I believe there should be put a minimum of topics on that category.
In case of outages, lock down the forum to more active members (that contributed regularly before the outage) and disable the promotion temporarily (so ‘normal’ players won’t disturb the peace on the DevForum).
On one hand, sounds like a good idea.
On the other hand, regular applications have been closed for literally over a year with outright zero word on if there’s even anyone planning to replace/reopen it.
I don’t necessarily mean the ‘Regular’ trust level, but just some activity requirements to ensure the member contributed before the outage and doesn’t just come here to complain.
Outages happen (often) randomly. New contributors can’t vandalize the forum if they didn’t have any contributions before the outage.
To make it more clear, imagine like the “hot questions” at Stack Overflow. These are locked to those with a reputation of 10 or higher. Something similar can also be implemented on the DevForum as whole in case of outages (but instead of reputation, something like “5 posts written recently”)
So, actually, no. It prevents more vandalism than it causes. Members without sufficient contributions before the outage are temporarily unable to participate until the outage is over, so they can’t harm the DevForum (either intentionally or unintentionally).
I don’t see any possibility how to bypass punishments on the forum. Contributions are public, henceforth DevForum members can see & flag inappropriate content (and 50% of these flags get handled within 24 hours, according to own experience).
my post was the first one from the bunch. Those came after. But yes, I do agree, they should not be there. I didn’t know that but now I do. I’ll try to improve in the future. Thank you
Roblox should absolutely suspend any users actively contributing to the spam there for long periods of time, not just for a day or two. I am sick of moderation being overly lenient; if the devforum was meant to be a professional environment, the moderation should reflect that. I don’t know what policies moderation is operating under, but they need to be amended. It’s quite disappointing to see problem users spamming and coming back the next day.
I did try to reply to the spam and received the usual backlash you’d expect from these type of people. I fully support the idea of suspensions for the authors of multiple spam posts.
There would be downsides to those attempting to use the forum regularly however, as they would be unable to post / have to wait a long amount of time between replies, personally if these restrictions were to be added I’d only want them to be applied in #development-discussion as that is where most of these occur in and the least likely place that a regular user will need to post there.
If restrictions were applied in one place, it’d spill out elsewhere. At this point it has to be for the entire forum if there would be restrictions. As much as regular use would be harmed, you can’t really use studio during the outage either way. For other forms of creative work that doesn’t involve studio, read-only mode is good enough.
Yes, it would be nice to have people stop posting “OMG GUYSSSS ROLBOX IS DOWN HELP ME!!!”, but I think that having it locked down or having a heave slowmode on it is a bit extreme for more experienced users like me, and many others.
“Then just make it regular only mode, duh!!!”
Many people (again, like myself) dont have Regular and at the moment cant get it, so that would be locking us out of the forums for long periods, while regulars have access.
“Well ok, but what do I do!! I cant handle all of these roblox down posts!!!11!!1”
Advice:
ignore it
It’s not too hard to see those posts, and just scroll past it or mute it, is it?
No, it’s not. If it’s a huge issue, just mute the topic and move on.
