The “Scripting Support” and “Code Review” topics on this forum have some structural issues that make answering questions and giving good info difficult.
This is not a problem of the website moderators, but rather a limitation of the Discourse platform itself.
If I were to create a proposal for a new ROBLOX stackexchange site, would there be interest in moving the “support” categories to there?
I hate to split the community like that – but it’s incredibly frustrating to try and answer low-effort questions with little to no formatting. You go back and forth with four or five replies just to get to the root of the problem before you can answer it.
StackExchange have several features that support the “good questions, good answers” idea:
Robust voting system beyond likes and flags
Expanded reputation system to gate certain capabilities
Ability to edit posts that you didn’t create at a high enough reputation (helps with the formatting issues)
Distinction between comments and answers (this is huge)
Scripting Helpers is awesome, and I used to use it a lot. I would definitely be satisfied if ROBLOX hired those guys and made that their official support forum.
They are a small team working hard, but their site does lack some features, like question categorization, a proper search, and some quality of life things like simpler matching for duplicates. They also had an unfortunate data breach recently (then again, so does Twitter sometimes )
But really, it’s a great site. Here’s their patreon if you want to support them.
Would a StackExchange site dedicated to ROBLOX game development be useful to you?
Yes, I would support a stackexchange site for ROBLOX game development and would contribute reguarly
Yes, I would support the site, but would probably not contribute reguarly
A similar topic (but specifically requested for downvotes/dislikes) exists too!
Yeah. Forums are more of a discussion place rather than a Q%A format for giving accurate info.
Giving inaccurate info is not against the rules, and sometimes you can get flagged for “off-topic” for publicly, politely, correcting users even though you stick true to the nature of the OP. Downvotes will allow for others to distinguish between what is good and what is bad.
Definitely. Don’t really know what else to add to this.
Stack Overflow has this, and it’s pretty neat. But it has to be approved by a moderator (and I THINK the OP themselves can accept it)
All the yes. Sometimes I want to quickly point out a minor issue with someone’s code while not writing a fully fledged answer to a question. DM’s to point it out just don’t cut it. Doing it publicly results in a flag.
Yes, however ehh there are a few issues over there
And for ethical reasons most users would prefer something official. If Roblox were to maintain the proposed Stack Exchange those users would go on the official one.
@Krunnie That’s a great point – I’ve used scriptinghelpers.org in the past, actually, and I think it does resolve a lot of these issues, and it slipped my mind.
While not as fully-featured as a stackexchange site, I do think it resolved a lot of these issues. I sort of get the feeling that it tried to reinvent the wheel, though – stackexchange sort of solved the problem of making a good Q/A website. However, if scriptinghelpers’ was the format for the support topics, I would be satisfied.
I changed the poll to reflect that option, and accidentally cleared the polling results @sjr04 and others might wanna re-vote.
Also, scriptinghelpers is dedicated to Lua only – I think that could be expanded to game dev in general.
As for the quality question, it’s a good one. StackExchange is not perfect, but its built around good moderation tools to assure quality. As for openness, anyone can make a post when they sign up. The reputation system only gates secondary things like voting, commenting, flagging, etc.
You’re always going to have bad questions, but the Discourse forum is not built to deal with them.
They tried this a few years back with staff support, but it got stuck on the “you need 100 people with 200+ rep” requirement. You would need to think about if you can meet that requirement now, and if not how you could stimulate active SEN users to buy into the proposal that aren’t already passionate about Roblox.
)