Forum Maintenance: Upcoming Features + Improvements

[Kairomatic (Kero)]

Hey there, developers

We’re working on improving the overall experience on the forums. Today, I’ll be covering a few improvements that will be happening very soon including: making it easier to stay on top of critical changes, better naming and organization of sub-categories, addition of some new categories, and a brand new dark theme!

There’s a lot of important information below, so try to stick with me until the end.

Update to Updates

We will be re-naming, combining, and deprecating some sub-categories in the Updates section. The section will be reworked and transition to the following near the end of the month:

• Announcements - All development-related news like: feature releases, property changes, studio updates, etc. Will make better use of tags for sorting content!

• News & Alerts - Rather than host company and other miscellaneous news in Announcements, we will be breaking it out into its own sub-category. This will include topics such as: website changes, moderation PSAs, etc.

• Community & Events - Combining the current Community and RDC categories to share information related to Roblox events and programs: Game Jams, Level Up, Accelerator, RDC, recaps, etc. Posts from RDC will be merged into Community, then Community will be renamed.

• Release Notes - No major change for now, but we did tweak some of the posting permissions (more to come on that some other day).

The Developer Incident Reports sub-category will be deprecated in favor of using pinned banner alerts along with the status.roblox.com page to communicate key information surrounding issues and outages. For one-off issues that are not platform-wide, please make use of the Bug Reports category to help us ticket, track, and follow up on any issues you may be experiencing.

Splitting & Prioritizing Announcements

We’ve heard feedback from many of you that it’s becoming hard to follow or prioritize all the news that is usually shared in Announcements. After the rework, Announcements will only be used to share development-related news and we will be breaking company news and other miscellaneous alerts into its own sub-category: News & Alerts.

To make it easier to stay on top of critical changes to the platform without needing to subscribe to the entire category, we will begin using the ‘critical-change’ tag news such as: property changes, deprecations, and anything that we think may impact your existing workflows.

Head to your Preferences and watch the tags that are most important to you!

Here’s the list of tags you may want to watch:

• new-feature - Releases for features that did not previously exist before. It can work independently, change how another object functions, or depreciate a previous feature or function

• critical-change - We’ll tag changes to existing features or things that may affect workflows. These posts may need your attention to prepare for the change.

• rdc-news - Pretty self-explanatory, I hope. With the merging of the Community/RDC categories, we’ll make use of this tag to alert you when there’s RDC news instead.

• accelerator-news - Dreaming of participating in the Accelerator Program? Then you’ll want to watch this tag.

• level-up - Follow this or subscribe to our YouTube channel for alerts when we publish videos from our game design education events.

• luau-recap - Follow to get a notice when we publish our monthly Luau recaps.

• new-beta - Like to test the latest tech? Follow this for any and all official betas.

There are a ton of other tags that you may want to watch as well. I encourage you to keep an eye out for the sorts of tags that are on topics that you find interesting.

We’ll slowly add to and expand the list of official tags. Please let us know if there are any major topics you would like to receive alerts for!

Other Category Changes & Additions

In addition to the changes coming to the Updates category, you may also begin to notice some tweaks to other category names and organization. Here’s some examples of the changes:

• Addition of Community Events Category - Upcoming community driven events. You can expect events such as game jams, meetups, networking, educational events and much more. Topic posting is limited to our Community Event Organizers.

• Addition of Education Support Category - This will be placed under Help and Feedback. As more educational experiences get created on Roblox, we want to provide a place to share guidance on how best to implement an educational idea, learn best practices for teaching content with gameplay, or developing an assessment tool in Studio.

• Addition of Education Bug Reports & Feature Requests - Report bugs or feature requests for Roblox Education products, such as: educational templates, experiences, and modules created by the Education team.

• Addition of Education Resources - These resources aim to make it easier to develop educational experiences (modules, plug-ins, tutorials etc), tagged under Education in the Resources category.

• Renaming Cool Creations to “Creations Feedback” - we want to make it more clear this is the subcategory for getting feedback about your creations.

• Renaming Forum Feedback to “Forum Help” - This is because the category as a whole is less a place for feedback and more so a place for getting help with the forums. (And then we be renamed the sub-category “Forum Help” to “Forum Questions”)

• Split Developer Hub Issues → Bug Reports / Feature Requests - Developer Hub Issues and Developer Hub Feature Requests should go in two different categories to match the pattern of all other Roblox platforms and reduce confusion.

• Addition of Category Overview - This isn’t a new category, but instead a document we’re adding to the FAQ to detail the purpose of every category.

New Dark Theme

To match the style of the rest of Roblox, we’re also releasing our new “Roblox Dark” theme that mirrors Roblox’s typography, style, and color scheme. Try it out today in the theme selector! In conjunction, we will be removing the Graceful theme as it does not match the Roblox aesthetic.

Upcoming Sweep

Did you know that there’s more than 6 years worth of posts hanging around? We’ve noticed that a lot of them have broken links, outdated information, and may be confusing for someone searching for answers.

Don’t worry, we’re not erasing 6 years of history, but we will begin to unlist, archive, or edit a handful of very old Roblox posts to redirect to the correct information. We won’t be removing any developer-posted or development-related topics, this is primarily a clean-up of old Roblox posts. Archiving disables the post from being found through search, but it will still exist somewhere in the internet halls of history.

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Congrats, you made it to the bottom!

We hope these changes will improve your experience on the forum! As always, please leave feedback and let us know how else we can improve

Shoutout to @metaversek1ng @peraldon @Hooksmith for their work on improving the forum experience. More to come soooon!!

[ValiantWind (Val)]

Interesting improvements.

Like said in the post, this will really organize the forum in a much better way.

Sometimes, it is really hard to find the help that I’m looking for around the DevForum.

There are many times where I couldn’t find the topic for the answer to my problem, but when I create a new topic, it gets flagged for “Already posted somewhere else”.

This could really fix that

Edit: I also want Regular promotions to be resumed.

[IJustDavi]

Is there anything new about Regular trust level?

[ItsKoiske (Koiske)]

The new forum changes look pretty amazing so far. Can’t wait for more cool categories to pop up

One thing that I do have to ask tho,

@Kairomatic

Renaming Forum Feedback to “Forum Help” - This is because the category as a whole is less a place for feedback and more so a place for getting help with the forums. (And then we be renamed the sub-category “Forum Help” to “Forum Questions”)

Will we be able to still give feedback as forum users? If we will, how do you guys plan on doing it? Personally, I don’t think that #forum-help:forum-features will be necessarily a good place for it and we all want to chip in a little to the vision of this forum.

[Kairomatic (Kero)]

Soon TM! We’re working on some changes that we think will improve everyone’s experience interacting with the forum

[GalacticInspired (Galactic)]

Amazing updates!
Looking forward to it!

@Kairomatic

will be removing the Graceful theme as it does not match the Roblox aesthetic.

I completely agree with this one, just switched to it, and no match.

EDIT:
Just switched to Roblox Dark, looks amazing!

[Kairomatic (Kero)]

Mhmm, gotta do it for the a e s t h e t i c

[ValiantWind (Val)]

Will new Developer Modules be posted in Education Resources Subcategory?

[TayIorRobinson (tay)]

@Kairomatic

Archiving disables the post from being found through search, but it will still exist somewhere in the internet halls of history.

I’m concerned about this. AS someone who’s had to dig up archive.org to find old tutorials on wiki.roblox.com, I don’t like hiding historical information, that might just be as relevant (or at least better than nothing) today.

Wouldn’t using Discourses “staff note” feature to add a warning saying “This post is 6 years old!” or similar be good enough?

[BaconHairFabFur (Bacon)]

@Kairomatic

New Dark Theme

To match the style of the rest of Roblox, we’re also releasing our new “Roblox Dark” theme that mirrors Roblox’s typography, style, and color scheme. Try it out today in the theme selector! In conjunction, we will be removing the Graceful theme as it does not match the Roblox aesthetic.

will this replace the existing dark theme that the forum currently has now or will it just be a separate theme?

aka this:

edit: nevermind, it’s a separate theme on the forum and therefore isn’t replacing the current dark theme

[Kairomatic (Kero)]

@ItsKoiske

Will we be able to still give feedback as forum users? If we will, how do you guys plan on doing it?

Thanks for the note, will keep this in mind and chat with the team about how we can best collect forum feedback.

[ItsKoiske (Koiske)]

@TayIorRobinson

Wouldn’t using Discourses “staff note” feature to add a warning saying “This post is 6 years old!” or similar be good enough?

That would be a hell of a lot of posts they’d have to mark for that. I can see why they’d rather archive it. Following old tutorials isn’t the best practice per se.

[TayIorRobinson (tay)]

I’m not sure of Discourse’s features for stuff like this, but if they’re automating it, woudn’t it be super simple to just change it from archiving to adding a note?

[colbert2677 (Dreamseeker)]

It’s great to have official tags so we can granularly choose which important news we want to subscribe to rather than seeing everything in our feed at one time. Are there any restrictions on the use of these tags so far? That hasn’t been mentioned in the thread.

Since TL2 are able to create tags (we have quite a number of pointless or misused tags), it might be troublesome if a developer tags a thread with any of the official tags and we all get notified of the thread where we shouldn’t - could be a problem for spam.

Additionally, what’s up for future official tags DevRel may want to use that already exist for other purposes? I know it’s a simple solution to just pick a different name but it’s also worth considering if alternative names are more searchable, memorable and to-the-point than a tag name that would be more appropriate but is already used by developers for other reasons.

Would also like to mention that we have #waywoc. It’s not an official tag but when Community Programs existed we tagged those yearly creations sharing megathreads with waywoc so they were more easily searchable. It’d be nice to lock that tag as well, if at all possible, so we don’t have to remove it off threads that aren’t actually WAYWOC threads.

[Kairomatic (Kero)]

@TayIorRobinson

Wouldn’t using Discourses “staff note” feature to add a warning saying “This post is 6 years old!” or similar be good enough?

Don’t worry, we aren’t archiving anything that hasn’t been passed through a group of developers to review. It’s only a handful of posts that could be confusing (like recruiting for old old old programs that no longer exist for example).

We are planning to add an automatic banner to old posts as well, but that’s a work in progress to do it right. An automatic apply/all message doesn’t work for most since the post subject matter can vary greatly. We want a solution that can direct folks to the right place to get the most up-to-date info!

I like automagic solutions vs automatic

[LocalWE (SteamboatOrchard)]

I don’t get how this is a Roblox theme tbh. Yes, I like the theme, but the colors are very different.

Anyways, I really like the improvements! I will definitely use this theme!

[hfun6]

@Kairomatic

Soon TM! We’re working on some changes that we think will improve everyone’s experience interacting with the forum

Yay! I hope I will be able to rank up! I joined around the time regular rank was made unachievable.

[Lunaryis (Bluey)]

Any news about the Trust levels and their requirements? Been over 1 year since Post Approval was removed in September 2020

[Kairomatic (Kero)]

@colbert2677

Are there any restrictions on the use of these tags so far? … it might be troublesome if a developer tags a thread with any of the official tags and we all get notified of the thread where we shouldn’t

Yep! The “official” tags can only be applied by Roblox Staff. That means we may end up with very similar tags for the same thing (eg beta vs new-beta or rdc vs rdc-news), but a tiny bit of extra work on my side means you can hopefully have a better time following and sorting through tags in different areas of the forum

I’m not familiar with WAYWOC, but I’ll look into it! Thanks for the heads up