As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to understand where a specific feature request is in the pipeline.
Take this engine feature request:
Can you tell me whether anybody at Roblox has seen it? Is it being considered? Is it on an internal roadmap? Is it being denied as an impossibility? Is it being worked on right now? I don’t think most people will be able to answer that, because the only recent communication on the request is indirect and quoted by a contributor more than halfway down the thread.
This doesn’t leave many with a good opinion on how communication is being handled. Most people will simply think that no one at Roblox has seen the request and they are ignoring feature requests entirely, as this is not a unique issue and the vast majority of feature requests seem to never get any response.
Proposed solution:
A simple “We’re looking into it, no promises!” would be great, but I think the end-all be-all would be a ticket status like there are for bug reports, indicating “Not investigated”, “Investigating”, “On short-term roadmap” and “On long-term roadmap”, with a short explanation giving new members an insight into what the specific statuses means (perhaps some more granularity for bug reports as well?).
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my and other’s experience using the forum because there would be more communication to not feel left-in-the-dark and ignored.
I actually filed a feature request a couple days ago on this exact issue with bug reports; It received a reply from Hooksmith so make sure to check it out (as I feel it might apply here). I 100% agree that this is also an issue with feature requests. After “The Big Bug Reporting Update”, I’m pretty sure it has been stated that the team has shifted their focus to improving feature requests, so you posted this feedback at an optimal time!
I’m not sure if a status label for the current way we intake feature requests will be useful. We take inspiration from feature requests but it’s somewhat rare for feature requests to be implemented 1:1 as product features because we have to balance a lot of competing concerns that might prevent that, or it might not be viable to implement most requests.
Feature requests rarely map nicely 1:1 to work that we have going on. Sometimes, multiple steps/features are needed to address a feature request. Other times, one feature might close out multiple feature requests. Sometimes, a feature request simply doesn’t make sense at all at the current moment but might in the future, so they can be open for many years.
We’re going to be working on improving the non-bug-report-feedback side of the platform in the future to improve how we communicate on this in general, but this will take significant time to get right, so appreciate your patience.
Btw, if there are any other platforms out there roughly of the size/impact of Roblox that you personally use where you feel non-bug-report feedback (not just publicizing a roadmap) is very well handled, feel free to send me a private message so we can check it out so we can take inspiration and build something world-class.
I’m glad to hear that. It’s refreshing to see that the vast majority of #forum-help:forum-features topics have a response from someone (i.e., you!), in comparison to the primary #feature-requests category. I hope progress is going well and that the rest of the development community will, literally, hear more from everyone at Roblox soon!