As a Roblox developer, it is pretty challenging to address and display change logs to your games or products. Hence why we have groups and the forums, right? Sadly, the forums are now gone and a new section in the Developer Forums was released that allows users to show changes and such. While this is a good idea, it doesn’t allow users to input their own thoughts on it to allow changes. Which is where a group would come in! Wonderful! But groups being groups, they’re often targeted by bots and spam. Which means any sort of input might go unseen. So, what can be done? A group forum! Exclusively managed by the owner and those who are able to delete group wall posts.
If you were to navigate to the “Group Forums” section, the rank scroller would turn into a sub-section chooser. If you look to the top right, you’ll see “Group Forums”. Going to that will allow you to add sub-sections and add new posts to it. There should be a group permission to enable users to create their own sub-sections and group forum posts. In order to post in the group forum, another group permission would be to allow users to post in already created topics. That way, there isn’t a mass-spamming.
With this implemented, it would make groups feel more like a community with a lot more organisation.
The Roblox forums were outdated for many years - the idea of bringing discussion into groups is good, but what you present doesn’t seem to be all much better than what the old forums had.
Some things to consider:
Statistics: How popular is a thread? Who are active in it? Who’s the last poster? Who’s the OP? How many replies does the thread have?
Searchability - if I want to find old content from a thread, there might be dozens of threads. How am I to find the content I need in this haystack?
Replying to. Really, if you want to avoid confusion, you need some way to reply to a specific post, without getting ninja’d and looking as if you replied to something unrelated.
Flexibility of the posts. Can I lock posts from being replied to, for i.e. announcements? Can I show polls to gauge interest in my group for certain hot topics? Can I embed content, such as place links (which the Roblox chat allows for), or similar, to better list content that might not be a group game. Could be for partnerships, events, and other social purposes. Will posts be able to have formatting? No one wants to read a wall of text, like this is slowly becoming…
That and more would make discussions on Roblox more useful for communities - bringing back the old stuff in a nearly identical state doesn’t seem like much of an improvement
Those are some great ideas to this and I really quite like them. This was just thrown together pretty quickly in order to show some sort of concept that would allow groups to seem much more like a community. Posting on a wall really doesn’t do much and can be quickly spammed out. The gist of this was to add a forum to groups in one way or another.
I really like the idea, and it would definitely be something I used - the only question is moderation. This would probably be more used then the original forums, I’m not sure the moderation power is quite there for something of this scale.
I remember Roblox mentioning this on one of the RDC livestreams a few years back. We’ve been waiting for a group overhaul for an eternity now and this could form a part of that; if we ever see such an update.
Moderation is indeed the biggest issue here, and one of the primary reasons the main forums were closed right?
One minor work around I think of when moderation is in concern is to submit forum publication requests just like we upload assets like Sounds and Decals. It could go through a moderation process before actually showing up on the group forums. Which would help users avoid those, 8 year later moderation violations and abusive forum usage. Then again, moderation would have to keep up with said forums.
Moderation poses an issue with this, for sure. It isn’t really supposed to be a huge forum, just for slight discussion. The 500 character limit would probably remain, essentially this is like giving your group more than one walls that have a specific purpose. Roblox moderators would be able to interact with the messages if they receive enough reports. Not to mention it could just be used as a bulletin board if the owner decides not to let anyone else to post in any of the walls. The group’s high ranks would also be able to moderate. It doesn’t just rely on Roblox admins, this time.
User-moderation is negligible. Roblox has to maintain COPPA compliance and overall safety for those underage. As feasible as it might be for committed users to get the job done, it’s impossible for this platform.
This exists in groups. It is user moderation. This is basically what I was on about. Certain people could just delete posts that are spam or anything deemed not-safe.
That’s different though, the delete feature for Wall posts is to allow group owners to clean the group wall to their liking. Also, this is one single location. Imagine every group on Roblox had 3 sub-forums, that’s already 3x as many walls to moderate, not taking into consideration the higher volume it will likely receive.
I’m not saying it isn’t possible, what I’m trying to say is there’s going to be things that slip through the cracks and Roblox as a company can not rely on users to make sure >13 are safe.
Understandable, maybe I didn’t explain things right there. By moderation, I meant deleting posts. Again, this is an idea so this really shouldn’t be a debate. I see where you’re coming from though, it would be tough to maintain, but unless your group is super large, I really doubt it’ll be too much of a problem.
I don’t think things would be that much more different from a moderation standpoint?
A group forum would still have the Report Abuse feature along with the user moderation features, just like the current group wall. I also don’t think there’s a linear relation between the number of forums in your group and the total number of posts being made. There would probably be a slight uptick of posts since discussions would be more organized and more enticing to join, but the posts would be spread out across all forums.
The current group system is already subject to lots of potential rulebreaking - simply dividing the discussions into different areas of the groups wouldn’t worsen the situation or put Roblox’s COPPA compliance in jeopardy.
The real issue with the public forums was not just the sheer volume of posts, it was the systemic toxicity that became embedded within the forum community itself over the past few years - Roblox allowed that toxicity to grow to a point where it was no longer possible to fix that community for the better.
Groups that are managed poorly will continue to have just as much chaos with or without group forums. Groups that are managed well by setting positive examples and squashing toxicity will be able to create a positive forum community for themselves. And if Roblox rule violations occur, the Report Abuse button will be there just as always.
Ive seen this a few times in differentvways (example: pinned wallposts/announcement tab, adding replies to wall posts like comments on other sites do, etc)
In any form itll be used, because in like game studios and groups in heneral, not every announcement warrants shouting it out to everyone.
As far as moderation theres options, the forums would be a group role permission (view, and post). And maybe regulate what groups get this feature (kinda like discord partner program, you can apply and every case would be reviewed to determine how eligible you are).
(User moderation would likely be group forums might be limited to 13+ users though…)
So basically user moderation or limit what groups get forums to make it possible to moderate.
