The Problem
Let’s face it. We all know how bad #development-discussion is. It has reached an infamous status for the mass amounts of misuse. At the time of writing this post, out of the first 10 posts in the lastest section, six of them do not abide by the guidelines in the pinned post.
Proposed Solutions
Since we all know this, many here have come up with solutions such as: (THESE WERE NOT PROPOSED BY ME, THEY ARE JUST EXAMPLES)
Make it harder to join the forum (Would work but would fail without my solution)
Allow members to join #lounge (Would improve Dev-discussion but would cause #lounge to become a disaster. I feel these people miss the old forums)
Lock development discussion (That would work, but very few people will be able to get Regular and post on it, making the forum as a whole less nice to use as people may have genuinely good topics that they are unable to post. though it’s probably one of the best solutions.)
Put Development Discussion lower down on the forum page (Development Discussion is less popular than other sections further down)
Close back the forums (The ultimate fix, but Roblox has opened it for a reason)
The REAL Problem (IMO) and My Personal Solution
In my opinion, the big problem with the current criteria for getting into the Devforums is that it’s too well-known. There are many tutorials out there on youtube that can give you the exact requirements and how to grind them fast. I’m guilty of using them myself. This defeats the purpose of the requirements, as instead of reading the forums to see how the culture works and what examples of good posts are, you simply spend a few hours grinding stats until you get in. That’s why I propose there be an element of randomization in requirements. I think changing requirements a week or so is a good way to accomplish this, as that wouldn’t be enough time for people to figure out the requirements, and changing it from a user-to-user basis would be too unfair unless some advanced algorithm is used or something.
But won’t people grind anyway?
That’s a valid point. To fix that, I would implement some anti-grinding techniques in the forum based on an automatically estimated read time for each post.
For Topics Read
The read time has to be exceeded for the topic to be counted as read. This circumvents the grinding technique of opening many tabs at once, clicking on them then closing them.
For Replies Read
The scrolling has to be stopped every once in a while. Perhaps based on the reply’s reading time. This is to circumvent the grinding technique of clicking on the middle mouse button and slowly scrolling on a long post overnight.
For Read Time
If the total estimated read time on a topic and the replies (or one reply is stopped on for too long) by a certain amount of time (5-10 minutes?) the amount of reading time after won’t be counted
After a user is promoted to a member, these restrictions can relax a little
In Conclusion
I think preventing grinding the member role will greatly improve the quality of it and make it easier to have high-quality discussions noticed here.
What do you guys think? Feel free to critique/disagree with the post; I’m not experienced in making them.