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.
I’d like to add on that this is happening to me as well- out of all the reports I’ve sent only one got a response, and the reply was only asking for more details. When I responded with the requested info it too received no response and the bug is still present today.
Really hoping the new feedback/bug report workflow is coming soon as I’d consider it extremely important.
Bug support here. I promise we’re working very, very hard to fix this. We’re working on an entirely new process to respond to bug reports, doing our best to keep up with incoming reports, and making our way through the backlog.
It’s a huge priority for us. I believe, personally, that one of the best ways to build a great product is to ruthlessly tighten up small problems. The community is the lifeblood of Roblox, and we value your feedback above anything else. We’ve been working tirelessly to get this fixed.
This is very nice to hear. However, since I’m not a Regular (even though I’ve been on this forum for years), I can’t use the bug support form, so it’s very challenging to get a bug seen by engineers. Given the circumstance, is there any other way to submit a bug report without going through bug support?
Please continue using bug-support for this. As mentioned above there have been recent improvements to the throughput speed. Separately from what is mentioned above we are also working towards a world where we have a good enough triage system that we can open up the bug reporting functionality more broadly without a manual review step.
After spending a lot of time and effort internally to scale up how we handle bugs across Roblox’s product engineering teams, we finally have a solution available here: The Big Bug Reporting Update
Everybody here in the current topic that made a post or Liked one of the posts (as of Mar 19) has had their join request accepted if they submitted one. I’m marking this as the solution of the topic for that reason.
For everybody else that participates here later than this reply, please follow the instructions in the linked announcement above on how to get your join request in. We are slowly accepting people from the backlog to make sure we don’t overwhelm internal teams, but it is our goal to clear out the backlog. It will take us some time before we’re caught up with requests so appreciate your patience here.
Thanks again for posting about this and for your patience as we worked this out!
