I know this will likely come off as me being ‘jealous’ that I do not yet have regular, however it is about an issue that has agitated me for the past few-weeks. Albeit the issue is small-enough it is still a minor annoyance I have with the forum that could possibly be somewhat eased. I have nothing against those who have Regular however it is a major annoyance to me when someone abuses the rank, usually this isn’t solely at the fault of the user, but partially Roblox themselves not letting the user get used to the forum before giving them Regular.
As a Roblox developer, it is currently too difficult to browse the forum without coming across bug reports and feature requests that are either duplicates, not descriptive enough or otherwise written incorrectly (for example a bug report that is phrased as a feature-request, etc.)
I believe that this is partially due to the recent addition of promotions for those who are ‘big’ developers on the platform, many of which have never been on the forum and likely only join because of this opportunity to become ‘regular’. A minority abuse this ability by creating vague or invalid bug reports. This is likely due to the lack of experience using the forum since there is no requirement to even have ever been a member of the forum to be able to become a Regular. This is made slightly-worse by the fact that Roblox does not demote regulars, even if they have multiple subsequent removed posts.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my experience using the forum because I would be able to browse the #bug-reports and #feature-requests categories without running into as many duplicate, invalid or vague topics as these reports tend to be harder to understand and/or hard to find in discoverability when I search for a bug I may be encountering.
The issue does not come when a singular duplicate or un-descriptive bug report is created, it comes in when someone creates multiple of these in quick succession and since Roblox has publically stated in the past that they won’t remove people’s regular permissions for this, no matter how many you ‘flag and move-on’ the user will still be able to continue.
Before I go into why your post doesn’t make a lot of sense and the fact that there already is a way to do so, can we stop blaming Roblox for the actions of the users? Would you blame Roblox for allowing people to DM each other on the platform just cus a % of users use it to scam others? The user is entirely at fault for their actions and this just infantilizes the users at fault and make things seem like Roblox forced them into mishap when we both know that it’s not the case.
Flag and move on. It’s as simple as that. Better yet - if you can add to the post, just do it. You can even reach out to them and point out how to properly post on the forum.
Any proof of that? I haven’t personally noticed this but I also don’t sit on the forums 24/7 and read every post and analyze every member of the platform so I might be wrong. Throwing baseless accusations without any proof isn’t very productive especially when your argument against this is the fact that you want to stay productive.
Gatekeeping isn’t very cool and this just reads that you’re salty about not being promoted to regular yourself. Don’t want to sound like I’m pinning blame on you but there’s probably a reason you’re still a member. I personally wouldn’t know cus I’m not an admin and I’m only speculating
Only people who get demoted are users who truly cross the line. Posting in a way you don’t like isn’t one of those lines.
Here’s a friendly tip that you should take to heart before you pop a vein worrying about how other people post:
This issue will never be truly solved without choking out the freedoms a lot of members truly want. Rather than worry about the devforum (which is more than likely abandoned by Roblox at this point), either ignore the posts or flag them and move on. It isn’t worth stressing out over this platform as much as you do now.
Just as @VegetationBush said: people aren’t perfect and will make mistakes. You can’t expect everyone to be perfect because you’ll only set yourself up for disappointment.
Then mute the category. That’s what I’ve done with dev discussion.
Not everyones perfect, and if you’re complaining at least tell the people who break the terribly written rules that make no sense that they should post in a different category, or don’t make useless posts, etc.
Also, you shouldn’t be making Roblox accountable for what people do, as @ItsKoiske has stated.
Upon a quick search through #bug-reports you’ll find quite a few users creating posts who have recently joined the forum, this implies that these users were ranked up for either on-platform activity (in-which many have successful games on the platform, so it would make sense) or were invited to join the forum and become regular under different reasons. In both scenarios, users haven’t made activity on the forum before getting regular and posting #feature-requests and #bug-reports
I’m not blaming Roblox for the actions of users, I am stating that one factor for some of these posts is probably just not knowing the rules, some of these users have their first post on the DevForum being a bug-report, my suspicion is that some of these users are just not gaining that experience they need to be able to properly write a bug-report, not looking at examples first, etc. A somewhat small delay to getting regular permissions would counteract this as it would encourage users to format any upcoming bug-reports they have before posting it.
These don’t just affect me or just other forum users. Assuming that bug-report filing still has some manual effort put into it, it wastes the time of those assigned with bug-filing to a degree. Many of these posts are eventually taken down, showing that it is at least some-what of a concern to Roblox. Also, I regularly read through bug-reports that relate to a bug I might be currently going through however the main post being undescriptive makes it either:
A. harder to find these previous reports because they use vague words in their title or don’t mention the issue in the title
B. the OP is written so poorly that it’s hard to understand if my bug is truly similar or not (this one happens way less)
I was well-aware that it would sound like that, as long as it isn’t a regular making these claims themselves it will seem greedy. I am not stating that regular should be treated as “elite” or that only those who use the forum a lot should be able to get it. I have personally been against regular for the past-few years (which you can see through some of my past-topics) but unfortunately it’s still the way everything works. I am simply flagging that some users are getting regular who have zero experience using the forum, which means they will be more prone to making mistakes, and because regular is “invite-only” people will look up to those with it. Requiring member first was just one way of mitigating this issue which I suggested.
Unfortunately many of the issues with these posts are un-fixable with a reply and directly-messaging users would count as “mini-modding” which is usually frowned upon. Flagging becomes an issue when there are possibly tens of bug-reports written in the same undescriptive style. I’ve found that when someone does get regular they tend to create quite a bit of bug-reports based on the issues they previously found - which is fair since when you finally get the opportunity to voice the bugs you have found, you will use that ability to your advantage. However, it makes a lot of clutter of mis-formatted or incredibly vague bug-reports. Simply requiring users to use the forum without the bug-report creation permissions first would allow these users to better understand how bug-reports should be written.
I’m not asking for the issue in itself to be solved, that can never happen. I am simply suggesting that requiring users to be “normal” users on the forum for even a short-length of time would allow users to better understand the correct reporting flow and the level of detail required.
#bug-reports is a category that I have to look at every now and again to find bugs that I am encountering and whether they are already reported, whether they will be solved or not, etc.
Ok but like give actual proof please? Speculation isn’t productive and it doesn’t help your case when you’re just over analyzing and nitpicking.
Wording in the original post:
From what I remember was said by a staff member about this (for the life of me I can’t remember where so no direct quote on that one), posts go through a filtering process internally before an engineer actually sees them. Besides, in a lot of cases, engaging with the OP solves the “obscurity issue” as they answer questions. That is also why staff members ask extra questions before locking any posts.
I also regularly browse bug reports for my job as a producer and QA lead and out of the most recent 20 bug reports on top of the #bug-reports category, one could probably classify as less than stellar.
If you’re aware of the tone of your post, why go with it? You should be aware enough to know emotional temper tantrums and blame games get removed from the forums regularly.
If these people are invited to become regulars and skip the normal member stuff, it means that they need it more than any other active user does. If they’re posting incorrectly or vaguely then it’s their problem, not yours .
As mentioned above, if you’re looking at an issue and are unsure if it pertains to you, ask questions.
Are those posts unfixable according to you or have you flagged them and they got removed?
Well you definitely see this as an issue and want it solved. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. I do agree tho that the post quality is much to be desired however the issue isn’t as bad in bug reports than you make it out to be.
I’d rather not give specific examples publicly as that would be calling out users, however if you wish to get examples, I’d be happy you to DM you a few.
This was a clarity issue on my behalf, sorry about that, I have fixed the original post.
Unfortunately as of recently I have came across some posts in-where the OP either decides not to elaborate or does so in an incredibly vague manner. This is still rare, but it has happened. Plus, requiring to reply to a post to elaborate over what a post means isn’t exactly ideal.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t come up with a way that I could word the post without making it seem that way, it’s incredibly hard to word things like this without making it seem like you are jealous unless you have the role yourself.
By “un-fixable” I mean both, there’s nothing I can personally add in a reply that could clear up the post and when a moderator got to the post it was later removed by them.
I’m not suggesting that these people shouldn’t become regular, I was rather suggesting that Roblox could give the users member and then regular at a later time after they are somewhat used to forum, unfortunately vague titles does affect discoverability on the forum and there has been many of times that I haven’t been able to find posts relating to an issue I’m having as a result of this.
For clarity, in this case by “solved” I meant that all posts in #bug-reports and #feature-requests be formatted nicely and not vague, which is an impossible goal. Also, I do agree that I tend to exaggerate on some issues. I tend to get agitated over small-issues, I’ll re-format this post later to see if I can better represent the issues scale rather making it look like an enormous issue.
Hey @Abcreator can you DM me examples of threads that impact your reading experience?
From the staff side (since bug reports and feature requests are, generally speaking, aimed at Roblox staff), we haven’t seen much of an impact to signal-to-noise lately so this is not really affecting us at all, but I can understand it is frustrating for your side to see some noisy topics in your feed.
It’s been a while since I posted the above reply and I have not seen much if any misuse of the bug reports category on our end. I’ll mark this post as the solution for now, but let us know (here or by private messaging me) if you see any situations where this is an issue in the future.
