The thread says that you need to start with “As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to”, and include “If this issue is addressed, it would improve my development experience because”.
And that “Your feature request must be written to comply with these points:”, where must refers to the requirements mentioned above.
This should be changed because this isn’t actually a requirement, and it shouldn’t be because user-story cookie cutters like these are pointless. It should be clarified so that this is just a suggestion, not a “must” for the post being approved.
The format is more than a couple of words. It helps developers format the content of their feature requests into logical chunks, starting with the existing problem, use-cases, optionally (but unnecessary) proposed solutions, and finally how it would improve their experience as a developer. Using post approval as an example, there’s a big difference between requests which follow it and those which don’t.
Typically when users don’t follow the format their feature requests become a blob of information purely based around a proposed solution or API change. Engineering or product teams care about the problems developers face and real use-cases, not the solution as they’re the ones who will come up with an implementation. Without use-cases there’s no justification to add a feature and it will most likely be overlooked.
The format also helps them easily find the relevant information since it’s in logical chunks (Problem > use-cases > additional info > how it’d improve developing on the platform).
Sometimes you will see feature requests without the format. While it is a requirement, forum staff won’t go out of their way to force it into a topic purely for aesthetics if it’s already formatted well. This generates unnecessary noise. I encourage everyone reading to use it though. It’s better to be sure than have your post hidden because it isn’t formatted correctly.
A lot of the content of information posts on the forum are the result of a very long-winded and iterative process of editing to maximize the number of people that ingest the information, given our (relatively) very young user base compared to other forums.
It’s not actually a required format, but if we were to formulate that differently, I think fewer people would use that format as a base and there’d be more noise in the category / in post approval to deal with as a result. Those two sentences help structure the topics in a somewhat natural way that is better than not having a format at all. I agree that the format could be better and that may happen in the future.
I agree that it is useful to structure the posts, I just suggest that it changes from a “requirement” to a “strong recommendation” or something that makes it clear that posts which don’t use those exact words can still be approved.
Have you read the rest of the paragraph? It explains why.
By the way I’m not sure if this is clear but the X should carry over in the next sentence. So if you want cross-server messaging for example, you shouldn’t say “As a developer, it is impossible to have cross-server messaging.” but rather “As a developer, it is impossible to make reliable features for cross-server trading or chat, because servers can’t communicate with each other.”.
If you want feature X and your motivation is “because I can’t do X”, that’s just stating the obvious. X isn’t a feature yet, so obviously you can’t do X, but it adds no useful information to the topic.