As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to
Notify my group members about new updates about the group from game updates to group news.
Solution
Group members should have an option to receive a PM or a Notification once a new shout has been posted on the group
If Roblox is able to address your issue, how would it improve your game and/or your development experience? Please be as specific as possible.
Addressing this issue would help a lot of developers who have either fan groups for their games or games in their groups [or both] by notifying the community of new game updates and would get the community to check out the new update / news for the group.
The problem right now
I’m not sure if its just me but the home page shouts location is too slow and would not show up shouts from people/groups for a while after they have been posted. As well as having it only accessible in one page greatly decreases the chances of people actually reading the news.
Looking forward to the group updates in general!!!
Just to get an idea of what people prefer this to be as I’ll make a poll
What would you rather get for receiving group shout news?
Notification Stream
Private Message
BOTH!
I don’t like this [ please explain why in a reply! ]
I would assume if this was added, there’d be some obvious things like blocking groups from being in your notification stream, maybe a limit to how often it would be there etc.
Notification stream is so under-utilized it makes me sad. We could get trade offers, party-invites, devex progress, forum replies, and so much more but all we have are friend requests & messages
I’ve thought this for a long time, hopefully they’ll update it at some point.
Also it would be cool if game devs could send notifications about game updates to users who have favorited their games in some way similar to a group shout, but without requiring users to be in the group.
PM’s would eventually become bogged down and mass deleted by users assuming every group you’re in could send these notifications w/o limitations.
I’ve not looked at my notification stream in a couple months or more.
Solution:
Developers aren’t able to make progress on their game that’s worthy of my attention more than once per week. These notifications should be throttled to 2 per week and adjust as needed. With this limitation in place I think both would be a great move and incentivise users to participate in groups more. Having the ability to share a major update with a special code to get a cool item would be really nice. We currently use Twitter for this, creating this same functionality on Roblox would allow us to send it to their DM to ensure they will eventually see the message.
My thoughts summarized,
Sending using both methods would be very powerful as long as the messages are limited to 2 / week or less. I would also like to see a way to make these messages expire when no longer relevant.
Normally we shy away from arbitrary limits like “You can only post every x days” because it inhibits legitimate use and doesn’t always prevent annoying messages. If someone abuses the feature, you should just unsubscribe from them.
As for being bogged down: Yes, that is super important to take into consideration as ROBLOX’s backend is already strained. Luckily, there is already a popular paradigm we can use as a solution. Instead of sending the message out to every player, the players request the messages from the server. This means that the messages are distributed over time instead of all at once, and inactive accounts don’t receive them until they log in. Using this approach, resource-wise it’d be no different than loading in the group’s shout.
I personally was in the middle of working on my own system to do something like this and use the player’s PMs…
Have the players subscribe in game and they’d be sent a PM each time I submit a “News letter”, though it came to my attention that the account I have would most likely be moderated for sending a lot of PMs within a period of time, so it wasn’t really a good idea… [ unless I were to make a few bot accounts… ]
So I thought posting this as a suggestion to be a feature would help a ton.
I can see where that method of requesting messages would be easier on the servers. It may strain them a bit more when the player count is high. Not my specialty though.
That’s a great point and I agree that people who are going to abuse will abuse no matter the limitation. The unsubscribe feature would definitely be a reasonable fix. I pity those who take a month long break and come back to massive inboxes of group messages, this is where I think the expiration feature would fit in. For example, as a developer i could send a “Twitter Code” to my fans that will expire 7 days after the update. Once the Roblox message expires people who get on the 8th day will not be falsely excited about a new code, they will know it’s old because it’s in the archive.
That’s actually another benefit of the ask-for-updates-on-login approach over the server pushing them out. The client can say “Only give me the last 3 updates” or “Only give me updates in the last week”.
don’t forget you’d have an option to stop getting notifications from specific groups…
