I feel like there are many many cases of people missing staff answers to questions in the sea of replies under public announcement threads. I propose some method of extracting and organising all responses in an accessible and formalised manner. Let’s discuss possible solutions!
Here’s one possibility: creating a new category within Public called “Staff Responses” and every time a new thread is posted, a new thread is also posted to Staff Responses with the same title and a link to the main thread inside. As staff responses come in on the main thread, they can be copied into the responses thread, where they are easily browseable and easy to refer to. This could also serve as a FAQ section without cluttering up the main thread’s original post.
Another possible solution: every thread would have a standardised Hide Details section called Staff Responses appended to the bottom containing quotes of every staff response. This would be present on every single new or active thread and serve to collate all responses in an ordered fashion.
Feel free to discuss and propose your own solutions below!
if you don’t know how to search, I’m sorry, but you need to learn. It’s one of the criteria for learning to use the forum.
why would we have a category that would be for staff responses to devforum threads, when the responses wouldn’t be on the devforum? The devforum is where things are before before anything else.
oh shoot you added more points I’ll finish typing later because I just got to campus
Being 100% honest I didn’t even do that before, I usually scroll through every reply. I consider myself a fairly educated user of the forums. It just doesn’t occur to people sometimes.
Duplication is undesirable. It would be more useful to simply highlight important responses under the thread OP like the solution feature does. This is probably achievable with a plugin for Discourse.
Discourse has a feature where a comment can look more defined. The comment block has a background color or looks highlighted. This could be enabled so that any response from devrel+ could look more defined.
This is a good point; however this still leaves one thing out: they’re still not organised or easily browseable, as you still have to scroll through the entire thread. They’re at least easier to identify this way tho. Maybe a hybrid approach would work best?
The first solution has proved unexpectedly popular, which is pretty neat. From this (admittedly small) sample it seems there’s a good deal of interest in some sort of response collation system. I’m wondering if we can get some input from devrel or roblox staff whether this would be feasible to implement, or if there’s a different way of doing it that would work better?
