I am also in favor of opening up the forum to the public, although I am a bit biased since I got in without showing any actual work.
I love the idea of allowing experienced developers to get more attention! Although I personally feel like it would be better to highlight individual posts. Everyone has the potential for great, and terrible things.
I absolutely do not think this should be handled with AI! Not because it is dangerous, but because it is a logical solution, to a purely social problem. A logical solution is very finite. But a social solution uses the intelligence of its users to go beyond those goals. Itās the limits of a few developers, or a few million users.
Exactly what I was thinking. The forumās skill gap is kind of ridiculous, I kind of see members loosing respect for each other; especially when a seasoned member critiques a newer member (newer members are very defensive about their work and seem to ignore the importance of our input)
I like that it opened up to the public as I am here, I would like to say that Developer Relations never responded back to me or any of my friends that where not in the forums. Now that I am in them I am getting a whole lot of help from Developer Relation and other developers. I applied for the DevForums about 1 and a half years ago and never got accepted or denied. Now being on is allowing me the opportunity to grow more as a developer! However, there are defiantly Cons to this. One of those being the forums becoming like the old ones. Others are being that some developers arenāt experienced enough. And I am not saying that you need to be a master developer, builder, UI Designer etc. I am saying you should at least understand what exactly you are doing. I have seen posts by developers who donāt understand how to do simple things in scripting. The automation is a great way to get more developers into the forums but we also need to think of repercussions. I am in no way a great or even good developer, but I at least know many things on Roblox and how to use those resources. We should think more about the quality of the developer than on how much they read. I could go on here for days and read things but if I never put what I read into my experience then what exactly did I learn from the Developer Forums. I am just saying we need to maybe do less automation and more people. I talk more about this here: Update to Developer Forum Entry Process - #300 by uhTeddy
I browse the forums daily and the amount of -sorry- stupid, low quality posts I see is insane. Yes, you can flag them, but I would rather just not see them in general.
There used to be an unwritten rule here about being professional. One used to expect that everyone will be polite, mature, and accomplished. There is a difference between Twitter or Discordā¦ and the Devforums. Here you could have an intelligent, serious development conversation, without the abstraction of the general public doing what the general public does. There are a lot of members here now with broken down grammar, there are some that are immature, there are others that have utterly no idea whatās going on. Keeping the devforums a privileged, close-knit community of the experts really is preferred over a forum over-ridden with low-quality posts and threads.
I used to take it for granted that scrolling through the āNewā tab would yield the accomplishments, contributions, assistance, and concerns of respected, expert developers with the experience this devforum needs. Now I find it with pranking threads, threads with little to no context, broken grammar, and so onā¦?! Quoting more than one ānew member,ā some of these accepted people donāt have an intention to develop or benefit the community. Basically, this devforum is turning into the forumsā¦
Sorry if this came off as degrading in any way, but the devforums is no longer what it used to beā¦
Expanding on to that a bit, Iām all for an intelligent community here. Iām nowhere near saying that 100% of these new members are individuals that have nothing to contribute and obstructing from the main focus. Some of these new members have contributed advanced resources, others have voiced their opinions in a professional, mature way. Sometimes these types of people donāt make it through the applications based on a staff memberās approval, I think many of us can agree to that. Right now though, weāre enduring and suffering from major consequences by opening these forms up to the public. I really hope that a perfect solution comes upā¦
Iām all for another section of the devforums purely dedicated to veterans and respected individuals, as long as itās not just closed to a certain amount of people, and other members can join eventually.
However, peopleās choices not to post here is on them, itās not Robloxs fault.
Wasting my time. Ultimately the purpose of the dev forums is slowly declining. Theyāre basically regular forums (If you want proof of that go look at the Bulletin Board). I donāt know how the rest of you feel but it has been a rough transition to say the least.
This seems quite dramatic. The Bulletin Board isnāt intended to be read normally. Most of the threads people complain about are moderated quickly without most people even getting a chance to see the thread before itās deleted.
Bulletin board is literally intended as a trash bin for declined posts / for random posts you want to link to off-forum users. Itās not intended to be read and it is muted by default, so nobody should be bothered by its contents. If you are seeing Bulletin Boards threads popping up in Latest/New then I strongly suggest you check your notification settings on these categories.
I feel like opening up was a good step. However I do believe that there should be a stricter policy on what is aloud to be posted about and what isnāt, due to them opening up. I feel this way strictly as some posts are just blatant and extremely informal.
Also, Iām not against new members being on the forums - I just think that thereās a better way to transition into that direction. This happened very quickly, with no warning, and with (from what I can gather) little requirements for new members ( references, Item sales, game analytics). These are all opinions but what I do know as a fact:At this rate, the forums will become more and more saturated with inexperienced developers, severely decreasing the quality of content and feedback. As more and more experienced developers stop using the forums.
Iād like to see the quality of posts rise again, maybe over time it will. It just confuses me because I see developers giving honest feedback and people get seriously offended and defensive. At the end of the day, Iām actually glad we can discuss these issues to better understand the direction the developer relations team is taking us in, It must be hard managing the influx in devforum interest as an effect to the Roblox forums being retired.
Some possible solutions? (Short term)
Improve our moderator services.
Stricter requirements to join.
Keep new members in the public category? (Is that a thing already?)
I had some friends complaining about how their applications were left in the void. This idea of activity based process is definitely a good idea.
But while some people show interest in development, they may lack development culture. Is it their fault? Have a big fat no. They most likely were never exposed to our standards, and because of it itās never been a better day to teach them.
That said, I have been maturing an idea to help tackle this. Some (full) Members can volunteer themselves to mentor the New Members that are accepted through this process (basically opt-in) so that they can be taught the rules of the DevForum, written and unwritten, through a period of time. This has the following advantages:
Quality of the posts can increase over time;
New Member gets in contact with an experienced developer, which can lead to personal growth;
The mentor will most likely learn something too!
Of course, the Top Contributor team will still be in charge of monitoring the New Members for bad activity and such, and mentors would also probably need to be supervised, so I admit this idea can be debated, as itās not perfect.
That category is important for the platform because it lets you host and link to richly formatted textual content that you can link from games on Roblox, since the developer forum is on the Roblox domain and therefore not an off-site link.
Moreover, we use it as a medium for reviewing posts from new members for restricted categories.
It is only to be considered a trash bin from the viewpoint of normal forum usage ā it has legitimate uses outside of that.
I want to make it clear: I have absolutely nothing against the average user and Iām glad that new members are getting in at a more reasonable pace than āneverā. But at the same time, #development-support:scripting-support is slowly becoming Scripting Helpers from the old day and itās frustrating.
Being a member who was accepted through this change after waiting for over a year to get in with no responses from dev relations for months I feel like this change does do what it is supposed to do but it does have some dangers to it. I feel like instead of members having a lot of access at the beginning they should have to prove themselves of having a use for the devforum.
An easy idea for this is to set an accepted response goal for new members to reach. Due to how scripting support, design support, etc works, people of all skill levels ask for help. This makes a good opportunity for developers to prove themselves of having some skill in development.
I feel there might be some trollers and some interesting individuals sharing skilled stuff, but i feel like this all feels now unorganized, the forum probably will need an overhaull of the UI and web design, I do really really think that a perfect way to achieve this of āFansā āDevelopers Sharing their contentā And āVisitors posting their not dev-stuff or just making commentariesā Would be a combination of āARTSTATIONā ART STATION Andā¦ POLYCOUNT
I agree with the OP in this case. There are plenty of people that read the dev forums because they are generally interested in Roblox news, whether or not they are a developer. If that person reads enough, they then have the ability to post. Why have a developer forum full of very inexperienced or non developers? And I donāt think saying that getting into the developer forum is extraneously hard is a fair argument, because it isnāt really, as long as you show your talent in a meaningful way. Thatās not to say you will get in on the first try. If you donāt, work harder and improve your skillsets, because once you do make it onto the forum, you will feel like you achieved something and have the proper knowlege and skills to post in a condusive way. I am sure there are developers out there that got in via this new program and were too scared to apply, but that doesnāt offset the amounts that will get in that simply do not develop, or their quality standards are not sufficient for this forum. That is my 2 cents.
It really just creates a new divide. I know those who had applications accepted feel its unfair, but from my personal perspective, and the perspectives of others; we had been trying to get in for a very long period of time and couldnāt due to the length of the process.
I am a front-page game developer and have needed the forums for years, the first application got declined due to the links I provided and that was last January. There are plenty of individuals who deserved to be in the forums and couldnāt get in.
The ānew application processā is going to be the jump from new member to member.
