As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to utilize the developer forums to its fullest extent due to the lack of a means to prove that we can properly and appropriately use the forums since Post Approval was removed quite some time ago by now.
So I am proposing a new system that I believe would allow members to prove that they can use the forums appropriately and follow the rules of them and their individual categories which could be automated to a certain degree.
My idea is that, since moderators are already looking through the forums regularly, they should be able to give users points in some way (this number would never be publicly visible), which would indicate that they followed the rules of the forum and/or that category, and the points would be unique to that specific category, and if they break a rule of that category, they would have a point removed. Once a user has enough points from at least 3 different categories, they will have āprovenā that they can appropriately use the forums and follow the rules and could then be promoted.
I believe that users should also have to be actively participating to prove that they can follow the rules, and so these points could slowly go down, eventually returning back to zero, after some time. I am not entirely sure on the specifics of how moderators actually check the forums or how regularly they do, but this sounded like a good solution to the issues that post approval previously ran into, which was not being able to keep up with the growing community.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my experience using the forum because I, and many others, would finally have a means of proving that I can use the forums appropriately and be able to gain access to all the benefits and features that regulars have.
Interesting idea, but I donāt think Discourse has the ability to do this.
On top of this, moderators do not look through the forum, instead the forum works fully on flagging meaning a points system would have to be fully based on rule violations and not following the rules.
That is true, most moderators reviewing your post do not actually read the post
Whenever a post is flagged it gets sent to a āReviewā section for moderators to look at. From there they can do further investigation on the topic but they usually donāt.
They can have a plugin made especially to do this.
Edit: I also think it isnāt unreasonable that moderators wouldnāt also include looking through the first x amount of topics in each category on a regular basis to make sure they arenāt missing any rule breakers that havenāt been flagged yet.
You must be very new here. Not only do they not look through the forums, theyāre often not removing flagged posts, or (more often than not) incorrectly approving rule breaking posts.
If the moderators were competent and actually did their job more than once in a blue moon, without needing to be prompted by users specifically pointing out which rule was broken (even when itās obvious) I would be all for this idea, or similar ideas.
Currently with the state of the staff team thereās zero chance of any form of non-abusable point based system. Post approval is the only realistic option and considering itās been literally over a year with zero word on anything, I doubt regular applications will ever open up again in any form.
I genuinely believe that the devforum is trying to be phased out like the non-development forum was, or at least having its userbase forcibly reduced by making it less attractive to actual developers who care about having a devforum in comparison to the many users just farming hearts with rule breaking posts.
Iām not new here, I am just speaking from what I would assume would be the case. Thereās no way that you could reliably only have moderators look at things that are being flagged, it simply makes more sense to me that they are looking through the forums on a regular basis alongside looking at flagged posts.
I have not seen many rule breaking posts on the forums that havenāt been dealt with within a reasonable time frame either so I am not sure where you are getting this idea that they arenāt competent at what they do.
Edit: I also disagree that Post Approval is a ārealistic optionā, from what I have heard and know, it did not scale well and couldnāt keep up with the rate at which the community was growing.
Yes. I think there should be an automated system that gives you āXā amount of points for views, likes, and engagement on your threads. Then, once you reach a certain threshold it notifies a moderator to check out if the points were earned legitimately and react accordingly.
I have 90,000 post views, been on the forum for 2 1/2 years, 750+ likes, and have visited the forum at least once a day 75% of the time Iāve been on this forum. (Iāve been on it for 950+ days and my profile says I have 721 day visited) and Iām still not a regular.
If automation is too difficult since Roblox didnāt create the forum software, maybe they could create some sort of external form where you enter your DevForum profile and it checks the stats using an API and if it reaches some sort of threshold you can submit the forum and some moderator will be alerted to review your profile.
I disagree, it shouldnāt be fully automated, if it were to be automated that would allow people to grind to get the promotion by posting low quality content. If a moderator, who Iād imagine they would already be looking at the forums regularly outside of looking at flags, gave a point to a post that followed the rules of the category and forums.
Using a purely statistical method like you suggested wouldnāt be an effective measure of whether or not someone is appropriately using the developer forum, whereas the solution I have proposed here actually would be a good method, conceptually, that is.
Basically you needed to be able to make posts with minimal to no changes during the PA process (and also not be in any hot water when it comes to moderation). The whole purpose of regular was to give you the ability to make posts without needing to go through PA, since you could be trusted.
Iām hoping theyāll add some sort of promotion system again.
Not being able to gain access to certain forums like feature request is kind of annoying.
(Plus it is also kind of annoying that you only have a certain amount of likes and currently no way to move up to get more as a new member, but can have posts flags for commenting and not just liking. (ex: I got a post removed for mentioning that a GFX had nice lighting, the message said āPlease like instead of comment short stuff.ā)
Since I am being pretty active it is annoying to have my likes run out so fast.
Thanks for your feedback! This is an interesting suggestion but we wonāt be able to pursue it since it doesnāt scale to the size of our creator community now and going forward.
The forum is already mostly accessible from the get-go with the exception of the creator feedback categories (#bug-reports , #feature-requests ). For these categories we are planning out changes to make these accessible to all users again in other ways than what is suggested here.
Closing this out for now. Please feel free to use the How to post a Feature Request template in the future to let us know about problems you are seeing on the forum!