As a regular user of the forum I have a hard time understanding what is allowed and what isn’t allowed in #development-discussion.
This is extremely broad and has therefore opened the doors to an extremely broad variety of topics.
The old description used to be
For discussing the art of making things on Roblox.
Can we go back to that? Because it was much clearer then, and it would be nice if what wasn’t allowed is clarified further.
The first topic is not discussing the art of making things itself, neither does the second or third, nor the fourth, (nor the sixth?). Are these fine due to the broad category description? What even is allowed then?
“The art of making things” is pretty much synonymous with “development”. The latter simply sounds more professional and is easier to understand – it must be remembered that Roblox’s audience is not solely English so a simpler vernacular is bound to be more inclusive.
Duplicate posts are a bit of a rough topic; we’ve all seen the countless threads in Forum Feedback complaining about “free model” topic spam. The section definitely does read like Quora sometimes in the sense that it’s sometimes filled with mundane, useless questions – such as “How long before you consider a game is a flop?” or “How often do you use unions?” Sorry to call people out but the truth hurts.
While the section is definitely feeling a bit more loose, I don’t think it’s critically endangered. If you see any duplicates or generally low-quality posts that have nothing to do with development, just flag them – and in the event of the former, with a link to a more relevant and older post. That’s worked for me in the past.
The first one makes it clear it’s talking about the actual process, like scripting, building, GFX, and whatever else. The second one is what might make people confused, since something like advertising a game isn’t really “making things” but could be considered development.
Now the purpose of #development-discussion is to discuss about development. (example: Help with a team, who inspired you to develop)
What isn’t good is: spammy posts, duplicates, wrong category posts.
And please, do not post more hate threads about #development-discussion
It’s not hate, the rules are vague, so I want clarification. I would personally love for #development-discussion to still be about discussing the development process itself and not stuff like “how to prevent being scammed” or “how much robux do you make” or “what is your dream limited item”
I think the current category guidelines are too broad. Anything “development” related is allowed in there. It’s becoming a catch all category and most top devs/active forum users I know have it muted.
I struggle to find topics relevant to me. I don’t spend a lot of time developing on the platform, it must be a really painful experience for people who do.
Searching by “top” doesn’t help when the topics displayed are either from #development-discussion:roblox-surveys, rants about star creators, feature announcements, staff introductions, rants about moderation, or just generally low quality discussions which keep getting re-surfaced and attract a lot of likes.
I think DET should make the category guidelines more strict to allow only technical topics, or topics which discuss the processes involved in developing on the platform. They should also improve the visibility of #lounge:roblox-discussion and re-purpose it for development-related topics which don’t fit in #development-discussion. It doesn’t make much sense for “general roblox discussion” to occur on a forum about developing.
Edit: Thinking about it, I’m not sure why we even have a category dedicated to #development-discussion. It’s the developer forum, all discussions should be development related. Maybe the category could be split up and discussions could be decentralised into sub-categories for specific topics? This would allow people to watch topics they care about and mute ones they don’t. Not sure how this would work, just throwing the idea out there.
I second this idea. Even though It might be a hassle to have subcategories in discussion, let’s be honest; the category is huge with all sorts of topics and whatnot.
For example:
Discussion > Comparisons
Discussion > Development Questions
Discussion > Art of development (processes of development, ect)
If DET was to enforce stricter guidelines, I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t know or care.
Subcategories would probably be ideal with changes in the guidelines, but not by itself.
I’m not entirely sure honestly. It seems kind of weird having a category dedicated for discussion when it’s a forum, every category is for discussion.
But yeah, that’s the general idea. I don’t know if I like those sub-categories though, they also seem like a catch all :P.
It’s kind of hard to get it right, I can’t really come up with anything. I’m sure someone from the product team at Roblox would be able to come up with a better solution which would improve the quality and allow for granular control of visibility for certain topics.
I have a question. If I understand the title correctly was there a previous description? I assumed it would have worked better, so why did it get changed then? Was there ever a point where discussion was doing fine?
Alright so been about 2 months now, and the description was changed to something longer and clarified things better, was able to flag more stuff without hesitation. So thanks for that. But I still believe one question is unanswered, that is, are disguised feature requests allowed? I often see topics like “should roblox add x?” or similar, or they ask the community to rate and give opinions on their proposed idea or whatever.
Please also add “If you are a Member, please message @[ ]DevEngagementTeam to request changes or report bugs.” but entering in a bit more detail about how to do it, after this:
Use #platform-feedback for requesting changes to Roblox or reporting bugs.
It doesn’t make sense to suggest using #platform-feedback when regulars already have access to it – they wouldn’t request features/report bugs in #development-discussion. Now the majority of topics are being made by members. So it doesn’t make sense for them. The sentence should still stay there, but we still get feature requests and bug reports in #development-discussion because #platform-feedback is not, can not, and should not, be open freely.
I have a question: are hypothetical questions allowed? That is, topics like “what would you do if studio became paid?” ?
I don’t see these as useful discussion on such a conjectural scenario, especially when the only answers to such question are “I would pay”, “I wouldn’t pay and move to another game engine” – not so open-ended. What constitutes as related to development is still extremely gray. Something like a studio bug could be seen as related to development since as developers we use studio to make our games, and the use #platform-feedback for bugs/features rule can’t apply to members if there is no clear way to post there in the first place. (which is why I suggest making it known officially that DevEngagementTeam can help with those)
i also may need this topic moved into #forum-feedback:forum-features
