As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to file a bug-report as a member in a reasonable time-frame. The method that TL1 members are supposed to take is to contact @Bug-Support, however this group seems to be incredibly back-logged (we are talking about waiting up to months for a reply, if at all) to the point that filing a bug-report through the system is not really worth it, if it’s a minor-bug it’s probably not worth your time, while if it’s a major-bug chances are that a regular has already posted it anyway.
Out of all my time on the DevForum I’ve only received replies from 2 members of the group, one of which is no longer an admin at Roblox, the other of which has only replied to roughly half of my currently open bug-reports (most of these bug reports being months or weeks old). There also seems to be very few members of the bug-support group, while the members of the group are now private - meaning there’s no way to tell who’s actually on the team, only a number of members which is currently 10, at one point they were not, and as far as I remember only 2-5 people were actually on the team, most of which were inactive and no longer visiting the forum (however don’t quote me on that).
My bug-reports are in-some-cases major bugs that need to be fixed as they can make some features practically useless. For example, one of my bug-reports was about a bug that broke a lot of the functionality of VideoFrames and has not been replied to in months and seems to have been ghosted. This issue is amplified by the fact that I can not see all messages I sent to the group and as such I am unable to bump some of my older bug-reports.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my experience using the forum because I would be able to more easily file bug-reports as a TL1 member without having to wait in some-cases, months.
Instability is the main issue. I’ve had experiences of them replying in less than 3 days, and there’s once that they’ve told me to redo my post and never replied, and sadly the most recent bug that I filed a few weeks ago never got a reply.
I don’t know whether if bug-support team doesn’t receive notifications or gets spammed too much (The feeling on Talent Hub), but if the DevForum is truly not convenient enough for them, we could try to move on elsewhere, but I think the main issue is roblox partially ignoring the community bug reports.
I can confirm this is the case. As of this reply I am making right now, I have a bug report which is 27 days old and has zero responses. It apparently has 8 views however at least 5 of them, if not all, are from me.
(If any regulars here wish to submit this bug report directly so it actually has a slightly higher chance of getting fixed then you’re more than welcome to)
No idea who thought not allowing users to fill out the wizard and forcing them to DM a seemingly slowly dying group was a good idea, but if they want to remove regular and force us to DM @Bug-Support then so be it, just don’t leave us hanging like this.
Not to mention, DMing that group wasn’t even officially announced as the way to do it, people literally only know it even exists solely through word of mouth. There’s still dozens of people who don’t know about it.
As a side note, big bugs seem to be getting acknowleged then just abandoned, or at least if there is any work being done on them there sure as hell isn’t any word on any of them.
A very notable example here is many users being unable to rate experiences.
Originally occurred a while ago (Unable to Rate Experiences) and took 4 months since the post was acknowledged (had a ticket filed internally) to get it fixed, and even then literally nobody was told it was fixed officially as it just magically fixed itself. Post was then locked because fixing itself with no word since originally triaged counts as a fix, which may not end well because…
A few months later it magically came back (Game Ratings Not Saving) and is approaching three months of no word since investigation apparently started.
I sure as hell hope this isn’t going to be a regular cycle considering the impact of it.
Note that bug support was supposed to be a holdover for high profile urgent bug reports, like a stopgap for the ranking process being down for a while. More and more people have been discovering it and its usefulness is going to run out because it’s impossible to scale a program like this, post approval saw the same problem. It’s a privilege/ luck that you’re still able to post through it at all. One of these days they’re going to figure out a decent way to rank up users without destroying the bug and feature categories.
This is what has been said for the last few years about anything related to regular, Roblox needs to focus on the short-term and long-term rather than just focusing on the long-term plan. It would be like Roblox telling you they are adding a new feature that will make your life much easier in a few years, and then proceed to let you need to use a broken, slow and not-scaleable feature in the mean-time. Problems like this should be an emergency (since major bugs cannot be reported as a member without waiting months) which to any other company I’ve ever heard of would be a joke since they deal with bug-reports in days, not months. ‘Regular is coming’ shouldn’t be a shield that Roblox can hide behind in order to not have to fix not-scaleable systems like this.
I do have to agree with this post. Although I don’t do many posts to the bug support team when I do it takes mouths until they will review it. One of my bug report (my most recent) it took soo long I forgot about the bug report.
They have been in talks about this and working on this the whole time post approval has been down. We had a nice system, it stopped working because it was not scalable. It’s pretty brazen to assume they have just been outright ignoring the problem caused by the lack of it. These things move at a glacial pace, especially lately. Nothing to be done about it. There are likely engineering dependencies for the ideal solution (i.e. they take a while), and it is a very difficult problem. They are absolutely not just ignoring it.
This is absolutely valid criticism though. This seems to be a widespread problem with this platform, we are left in the dark with no solutions for things that are simply missing because Roblox has their “grand plans”. E.g. native CollectionService management in Studio, missing toggle for UI editor, etc.
I’ve decided not to report bugs, because I know that by the time a staff noticed my PM, a Regular would’ve posted the bug publicly and it would’ve been taken care of.
Post approval was still far more scalable than DMing the bug reports team is.
It’s far easier to just hire more people to review posts than it is to hire people that can handle the bugs. Especially with how quick the devforum is growing, and how many users are on here that could (and probably would) grind out pages on pages of checking posts nearly daily.
Forcing users to contact the group directly made it FAR worse for everyone than just leaving post approval up as now the bug support team have to do the post approval themselves for posts that are free form and completely unchecked (meaning there’s likely going to be a lot more incomplete or improperly written bug reports sent in) as well as the usual triaging and fixing those bugs.
As Abcreator said, they need to think about both the short and long term. It’s fine and dandy to say that something isn’t good for the long term, but getting rid of it without any other plans in place only fixes the short term and has started a domino effect of making it outright impossible to report bugs anymore (because at some point the bug support group 100% will mute all DMs, it’s only a matter of time)
Replying to the “27 days old and has zero response”:
Personally what I would do is give the bug report team 2 weeks to respond to your report, if this does not happen, you can always bump the post by saying “Just to remind you, this is still occurring” or similar. The amount of messages that this group gets is probably way overboard which is why you’ll sometimes be left with no response, I sent in a bug report 2 weeks ago, and I bumped the report just recently which got me a response 1 day after.
Just to say, it won’t hurt to remind the bug team that your report exists. Just don’t do it so often.
Well to offer a counter-example, my very limited experience with bug support has been positive so far. Just 16 days after submitting a bug report to @Bug-Support I received a response and my post was approved by Roblox staff.
I think your mileage may vary depending on how well your report is written and how high priority the bug is. I would assume that reports that follow the format and provide easy reproduction steps would be approved faster.
…What? This does not make any sense. Post approval is not more scalable, it handled far more types of topics than bug support does now, not to mention it was entirely volunteer-driven. Unpaid. It was not healthy for our volunteers to be reading 100+ post approval requests every weekend, and this number was only steadily increasing. This is the definition of unscalable, and the same thing is happening to bug support (with fewer employees with more other responsibilities).
Far more scalable doesn’t necessarily mean it is scalable, at least to the point that’s needed, it just means that you can make it bigger a lot easier than the other option.
For the bug report team they have to likely sign an NDA or two about some internal workings, probably also have to have some sort of past education and experience in computers or whatever, but for post approval all they really needed was to be a really active member of the community who was willing to do that. There are far more eligible people to work on PA than as bug support, and it would be far easier to get more in and quicker too.
As a former member of post approval and former community sage wherein we oversaw the majority of this program I can tell you that we tried this for as long as we could and it did not work. These things were decommissioned for a reason.
After posting this topic (and a member of bug-support was apparently informed of it), I miraculously got a response on the bug-report mentioned in this post, for anyone wondering, it seems that bug-support is running on a ‘last-come, first-served’ system (to an extent) due to the inbox likely being listed in that way. I recommend to bump any old reports you may have every few months (although don’t do it too often) as long as the report is still valid and still occurs.
This still doesn’t solve the issue of bug-support being ‘too slow’, the fact that they don’t have some sort of system for surfacing old-reports is still an issue and the fact that someone uninformed on the full procedure can end up waiting almost indefinitely is something that definently needs to be tackled with. On top of this, I still cannot view a list of all messages I sent to bug-support so simply bumping all the ones from a few months ago is unfeasible.
I think you accidentally linked my reply to your post and not your post…
Anyways, good job. @Bug-Support isn’t completely dead, but they are very slow. I submitted a report about the “CylinderMesh humanoid model issue” and the one in the bug reports page got fixed faster, despite the post I made being older. I said the problem was fixed in the post I made, and they closed the topic, so obviously they’re active.
This is an issue I’d consider very annoying. Time to get a regular to post a feature request…
Thanks for all the feedback on various issues regarding the bug reporting workflow. We’re very aware of these issues and understand that the current situation prevents you from effectively providing us with feedback.
We’re going to be shifting more internal resources towards prioritizing creator feedback workflows (not just adding patches here and there as has been the case since ~Sep 2020). I will try to be as transparent as possible about things we are planning to roll out as we finish planning and things become more clear, and get feedback from the community early on where appropriate.
Many thanks for continuing to push on these issues and we really appreciate your patience!
It has been just over half a year since this reply and there has been no publically known progress made on this. To make it very clear on the issue:
Right now, @Bug-Support is not slow but outright rather a game of luck you either happen to send your report when an admin is online so it’s responded to instantly or your report is sent to the bottom of the inbox where it will forever remain.
I recently got this feature-request through bug-support, as it was a bug yet did not qualify to be in #bug-reports (New Commission 'Rules' For In-Game UGC Sales Are Detrimental To Public Groups) this issue was promptly resolved by Roblox however it’s worth noting that most of the replies are people who were completely unaware of the issue and therefore would have not filed the bug themselves. This means this issue being resolved was entirely up to luck with @Bug-Support, I got lucky and sent it when a group member was online however many similar issues may not have been! We may never know about these issues as a result.
As a developer, to me, @Bug-Support is a bottleneck in my development process, if I ever come across an issue while developing I have to hope someone else already found it or go through the entire slow and repetitive sending of ‘bump messages’ with @Bug-Support. The only other option I would have would be to ask a Regular friend of mine to post it up instead, however that would be posting by proxy and therefore I don’t do that.
