So, a lot of new group roles have been created, and some seem to have been modified from their original uses.
In particular, Top_Contributor has gained over 70 members, Lead_Top_Contributor has been added, and a whole host of “Featured” roles have been added. There really isn’t any information on why, or how, and we’re all still waiting for “Champion of Roblox” to be announced as why that’s a thing.
So pleaseeeeeeeeeeeee. Stop keeping us in the dark. Why are these roles a thing, and what are they doing?!?!
I’m also not quite sure of what the Top Contributor group means right now. When it started:
I understood it as if it were a group which would help moderating the Developer Forum as it continued to grow and include more members - fact is, with all my respect to everyone who was chosen for the program as they deserve to be there, some of them haven’t posted/logged in to the forums for months.
I can only assume that the original role was fulfilled by the new Lead Top Contributor group, and that the current one stands as a symbolic group.
With the dev forums being opened up to more and more users roblox has been trying to find a way to keep the site profession and helpful while still open to a wider audience.
Group Roles has also been a great way to organize users and help them show what they are good at.
“Top_Contributors” is a group of users roblox trusts that they selected to assist users on the forums, it is active members of the community, in good community standing, who agreed help out on the forums. Top_Contributors communicate with dev relations and are mediators for users looking for information.
It’d be nice if they gave us more information on stuff like this. A lot of their updates are very cryptic feelings. However, I disagree with “Active Members of the Community” when looking at DevForum Activity.
If we want to get technical ~75% of the top contributors group have posted in the past 10 days. I don’t think we should focus on the negative though. Perhaps the 25% that haven’t posted in a while have been very active and helpful in the past but have gone through a tough and busy time. Maybe Roblox added them because they wish to see them more active.
In general we shouldn’t complain about this type of labeling and instead focus on bringing our strengths to the dev forum and make it a better place that way, no matter our roles. That is what I have done in an accelerated manner since January. The majority of roles come from what you put into the dev forum, keep posting content that is well received and Roblox can find you.
Tru, but the lack of Transparency on literally everything is a major buzzkill. Every day Roblox has something new that they only half tell us about it.
Like you said, everyday Roblox is changing and evolving! Roblox is always working hard to improve and sometimes that can be overwhelming. Top_Contributors is a step towards transparency, it is the solution to the rise in demand of information from the players. Roblox only has so many staff. However now instead of only the dev relations team to answer your questions you also have a team of 70+ experienced developers who have the resources to find the answers to your questions and offer more insight.
We looked at each person’s quality of character and the experiences they could bring to the community – not the quantity of their activity. The type of users we invited ask “What can I do to be part of this?” and then do just that, rather than “Why didn’t I get invited?” Top contributor isn’t a badge to collected – if you’re asking that question, you have your answer.
Edit to lengthen my point:
It just feels that the name implies “people at the top end of contributing” and generally both quantity&quality would decide whether you are at the top or bottom end of contributing.
Just because 10% of the work is really difficult, doesn’t diminish doing the 45% of work that is easy. Thus, it’s very strange none the less some of the people getting Top Contributor, I, and others, would believe to not exactly contribute all the same in the community, at least, DevForum wise.
People in this role are meant to be knowledgeable about a particular (set of) skill(s) and consistently give sound advice / can teach best practices on topics related to those skills to other developers. Typically this means veteran developers, top developers, or veteran developer forum users (but not just exclusive to that). We also wanted enough diversity in the skills they have as a whole.
Getting the role has somewhat little to do with how many replies you make on the developer forum or how many posts you like, because this has nothing to do with skill or ability to mentor other users here. That’s why these arbitrary statistics are not really taken into account.
As for the new groups, nothing spectacular:
Lead_Top_Contributor (now Community_Sage): Everyone that used to be in the first batch of Top_Contributor (i.e. EchoReaper and myself).
Top_Contributor: Everything that it used to be, minus reviewing bug reports / feature requests from New Members / non-devforum users.
Roblox_Champion: Users that are part of the Champion program that is yet to be announced.
Featured: No clue. Sometimes empty groups just don’t mean anything, sometimes they do. It doesn’t really matter until they are announced.
Is there a way to recommend people for the top contributor role though? Looking briefly at the list it seems mostly complete, but lacking some (in my experience) worthy posters. Something like a ‘top contributor nomination’ section seems like it could adress that, while having the community a tad more involved in decisions like this.
When you get a chance, please feel free to list out the remaining questions you have and we can get back to you with more information. We want to make sure we are 100% transparent with our developer community. Thank you for calling this issue out!
The only one of the top of my head that Thomas hasn’t answered is why is there barely any information about the Roblox Champion program if you guys are constantly showing it off via having users with the tag? Why does it seem so secretive while being in plain sight? And when is it gonna be announced roughly?
Basically. Is there any information you can give about Roblox Champions?
Also, at this point, I believe the DevForum is now switched over to Roblox Servers. Why was that switch specifically made? There had to be a tipping point right? What was the specific reasoning behind the switch? What’s the gain now?
This switch gives us more control over our own servers and full customization over the Developer Forum site.
Here’s the information we have about the Champions program.
What are Roblox Champions?
Roblox Champions are people who have been contributing towards the developer community by producing educational content, mentoring developers, answering questions on and off the developer forums, and being an inspiration to their fellow developers.
How does someone become a Roblox Champion?
Do the things that we look for in a champion. Build educational content, answer developer questions, share your knowledge and skills, and inspire others to become better developers.
Please let me know if I missed any other questions.
Any potential tease updates for the DevForum? Or is there any plans to revamp at all? I do like the current look and all.
Also Badges. Will we ever get more badges? The login ones are kinda lame. With full control I’d have to believe that we could do a lot more with badges. Even badges related to Roblox the website.
Also plz dark theme now.
Edit: And for the sake of transparency and what not, could we ever see a section of the DevForum devoted to DevForum Members asking questions to be directly answered by staff? Would be super useful.
You are welcome to make another thread about this, but you’ll have to have a convincing explanation on how more badges would be beneficial for the community.
I think this has been said before in the thread, but let’s not think of devforum statistics/badges as trophies that have some bigger meaning. That doesn’t actually help anyone, that’s just obsessive and gimmicky. You really don’t get any status or skill from having these things.
Should be doable just fine right now with an extension?
Staff members can decide themselves how much time they want to spend on the developer forum and whether to answer questions. They will comment on your threads if they feel like it. A section like you suggest would be harmful (lots of noise/entitled/duplicate posts) and it wouldn’t be any different from what we have now.
