As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to control who and what replies are visible on critical reports such as feature requests and bug reports where providing the best infomation to enginers while waiting for DevRel to respond to my flags.
Some threads provide critical infomation to both developers and engineers when major issues happen, the response time from DevRel on these threads are not ideal to minimise the issue of people replying garbage infomation that helps no one.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my experience using the forum because it would help everyone in the quality of key reports and minimise people getting infomation that requires key real-time infomation such as replies from Roblox moderations, important clarifications and updates, etc.
I don’t think limiting accessibility to certain features (e.g. allowing topic creator to determine whether you are allowed to voice your opinion on something or not) is the way to go here. This is both subject to opinion of whoever happened to create the bug report or feature request, and also requires active effort from the topic creator, so some creators won’t know about the feature or how to use it properly.
I think we’ll pivot more towards highlighting staff responses better in the future so that it’s easier for you folks to see when we have responded to a topic.
The idea is designed to be a range of possibilities, from limit only to Roblox staff to per reply restrictions.
In off platform discussion of this area, the idea of Twitter hidden replies existed when thinking about abuse of the feature when going beyond the simple lock feature. It isn’t the only solution of course.
There are and going to be threads where the quality of information is important, such as Roblox going down and there is one report where everyone’s watching to get the latest info, or key stakeholders are relying on a specific thread and need a clear look for responses.
Roblox already does this feature by locking threads, you could make it more clear who can respond to a thread and why, expand it to more groups of people who don’t require moderator permissions but would be valuable to reply.
This is a harder problem than it seems; it requires having a good perception of which people this includes, and the group also differs depending on who you ask. Moreover, this may require a lot of manual effort to get right.
We likely can’t commit to any sort of filtering that isn’t algorithmic, and I’m afraid that algorithmic sorts often fail to capture the entire breadth of community feedback. So this is a hard sell similar to the current problem related to Member/Regular permissions, that is also highly undesirable.