Don't send messages about accepted/declined friend requests to inbox

As a Roblox player, it is annoying to receive messages in my inbox about accepted friend requests

Since a long time ago, we have received messages in our inboxes about accepted or declined friend requests. As I see it, this was only due to a lack of a better place to send these notices. This isn’t the case anymore, and now we currently receive a notice in two different places:

Inbox

Notification stream

image

Due to the fact we have the notification stream for these types of things now, I don’t see a reason to continue receiving messages in our inbox about friend requests, and think we should only receive them in our notification stream.

25 Likes

I don’t get declined friend requests messages o_o

Are they still a thing?

3 Likes

Not sure. I just remember them being a thing before. They could be gone.

Absolute support for this. There’s no need to send a message about it when the same thing is sent to the notification stream – for people who are constantly adding and making new friends this is just another thing contributing to clogging their inbox.

5 Likes

The notification stream is flooded with friend requests, anything else that gets put in there will just be lost in the noise. It would be good to separate system notifications from private messages anyway, though.

1 Like

To be honest, I like getting messages when someone accepts my friend request, I never check the notification stream though as I do not find it useful.

2 Likes

Not that this is too relevant to this thread, but these can be disabled.
image

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I feel like, since the addition of the actual notification stream, it is a logical misuse of the messaging system to use it in this way. The only argument for keeping it is habit: people have experienced this behavior for many years and don’t want it to change. But it doesn’t make sense to keep it this way.

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It’s definitely on our roadmap to remove the system messages from the inbox!

Just curious, what do most people use Messages for?

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A generally more reliable method of communication with other users, including those who are not our friends, as opposed to the chat system.

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Two main uses. Anyone who is remotely popular or a community figure has to deal with lots of fan PMs or help questions for your game that it’s really difficult to respond to. If I’m just talking to people I know though, it’s somewhere in between email and the Roblox chat.

Email isn’t a good fit IMO – it’s too slow and more bloated than the discussions I have through PMs. The Roblox chat is far from preferable as well because it’s too limiting of a medium for communication:

  • I can only start chats with friends, who I more than likely already know on Discord. There’s no reason to use Roblox and be subject to
    • Kid/safety rules like no offsite links or mild profanity
    • Having to wait for images and other media to be approved by moderation before I can share it
    • Only being able to chat with Roblox users, rather than other friends who don’t play Roblox (IRL friends, gaming friends, etc)
    • Limit on how many people I can talk to at once
  • Clunky, tiny interface is awful. I don’t think I’d ever voluntarily use a chat this small
    • See Discord, Skype, or Slack for appropriate screen occupancy
  • Equivalent of Google+ for Roblox where we shove it in your face to encourage use instead of enticing users with useful functionality
    • Forced footer at bottom of site instead of something more appropriate like notifications stream button
    • Automatic popups whenever I get a message
    • If I’m indisposed and can’t respond, I still have to hear tens of sounds spam-ping in the background every time someone sends me a message
      • Don’t re-notify if I’ve already been audibly notified in the past few minutes and haven’t checked yet?
    • Every Roblox tab blaringly flashes its title while I have unread messages
      • Remove functionality that changes tab titles
    • No Do not Disturb

Examples of fan mail/support:

  • “Can you restore my data in your game?”
  • “I’m having an issue with my purchase”
  • “Can you friend me?”
  • “I love your game omg!”

Examples of PMs

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

Example 4

Example 5:

PMs would be more useful for the fan mail/support if:

  • I could only be directly contacted by people I know (friends, people I know in my communities, etc) and have everything else separated from my personal communications
  • I could tie fan mail/support to my game instead of my account
    • No longer clutters my personal messages
    • Scales better since now I can have a team of game mods responding to user questions
  • Better scalability
    • Searching
    • Ticket like system to keep track of which PMs I have responded to and which ones I still need to?
    • Automatic filtering based on keywords
    • Canned responses

PMs for personal use are mostly usable, but we could learn a lot from Discord DMs:

  • Searching
  • PMs for each user in one place instead of spread across multiple, distinct messages
  • Ability to edit
  • Supports realtime communication, but not forced (I can set myself to Do Not Disturb)
  • Can see if user’s online through DM window and user list
  • Don’t have to browse to the user’s profile to send them a PM – can just search through list of known users or pick from recent messages

It’s not like Discord DMs are perfect though. There’s no in between for ability to DM and blocked. I can’t treat myself as Do Not Disturb for specific users who I’m fine with messaging me but who message me a lot with unimportant content

2 Likes

Many people, especially Roblox Developers, receive tons of messages from Roblox’s Inbox Messages. This website feature is honestly extremely useful. There are tons of reasons why people do actually use it:

  • Contact the person without being friends with that person.
  • Share your opinions about something.
  • Get information from Roblox about different topics.
  • A lot more professional type of contacting than the chat shared by people in each other’s friendlist.

The organization in the Inbox section gets filled with different topics:

  • Your friendlist changes.
  • Messages sent by Roblox.
  • Messages sent by other Roblox players.
  • Team Create Invitations.

You can see an example of this ‘mess’ in the screenshot below:

In my opinion this kind of ‘mess’ can be prevented if Roblox does add different sections for those Inbox messages. What I actually mean by that is there could be a section which could only receive the messages sent by Roblox and the other Roblox players to you. As there is a section called ‘Sent’ which has the messages YOU sent to anyone, it had be a great decision to do the opposite of that.

I do really think that there are tons of ways this kind of disorganization could be prevented pretty easily and it should not be a big deal in my opinion.