Make Development Discussion rules and description strictly clear

Forum Help Forum Features
#1

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to find posts that have effort put into them and posts that belong to #development-discussion. There’s little to no posts that are meaningful and contribute to development in #development-discussion. Every single time I log into the devforum, the Development discussion is FILLED with spam posts like the following:

Yep

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Game Design Help
Development discussions category is occupied mostly by these specific posts. Posts that belong in #help-and-feedback:game-design-support.

"Is this worth buying? How much should I spend on this?" Posts
I often see these posts in the category even when its strictly stated in devforum rules itself. People asking if they should spend money on Y. People asking the amount of money they should spend on X.

"URGENT HELP" Posts
These posts are also spam, since they are most likely asking you to help them script or build or help them in other stuff, which should go in #help-and-feedback

Website Update Discussion Posts
You often may seem to not agree with certain website updates that roblox makes. Even the most minor, non development related updates are being portrayed as evil updates and being discussed upon in the category strictly for DEVELOPMENT Discussion.

"I GOT SCAMMED!" Posts
People who post these topics generally panic about them losing something important, generally during commisions. And try getting “help” for something thats irreversible or should be dealt with by Roblox Support System.

“What is your … X?” Posts
These posts generally ask questions related to how you did something, when you started to do something, or what is your worst/favourite experience/part of X. These posts generally are unnecessary and are mostly just there to get likes and attention of people.

Other Troll and Spam Posts
Posts that are intentionally made to troll. Spam such as advertisements (direct or indirect), joke posts. etc.

These are the most prevalent topics created in #development-discussion. Literally, only these posts are being created these days in that category, and are constantly being bumped by either people trying to tell them to post the topic in the correct category or people replying to them in serious regards. These topics hide valuable topics in the category and is a serious problem. At this point the category feels like a joke to many. Theres lack of valuable topics and ACTUAL discussions in the category. The rules should be made clearer for the category as well as its description (about section: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/about-the-development-discussion-category/14)

Some solutions that will help fix this problem are:

No. I disagree with making Development Discussion a Regular Only Category.
Yes, i am serious. It may seem like I sound a bit too sympathetic. But its true, making the category regular only propose many problems. Since theres no current way of getting a promotion from Member → Regular. Theres no point in doing so, unless and until there is a way. This will spark toxicity, people leaving the forum and people who would like to host actual discussions that are members, being left in the shadows.

Better Moderation
These spam topics are really out there, even after getting flagged, and take several hours and even days to be hidden.

Separate Rules for The category
The rules of the category are not clear, they should be stated in the main Devforum rules topics to actually educate people on how to use the category properly

Specify Topic that belong to the category and topics that don’t a bit more in detail (In https://devforum.roblox.com/t/about-the-development-discussion-category/14)
Specify topics that fit the category and topics that don’t a bit more in detail, to actually give new members an idea on what to post in the category.

Add Trivias to @discobot’s interactive user tutorial.
Add a trivia based step in the bot’s tutorial that educates users on what to post and in which category. This is going to prevent a LOT of clutter on the forum.

These are just a few solutions that I can think of the top of my head. A lot of these topics are made to address these issues in #forum-feedback:forum-features but are rarely looked into. Theres a recent spike in the amount of posts in the dev discussion category (from around 40 → 70+). And approx. 60% of the topics are spam.

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my experience using the forum because we’ll have valuable and meaningful discussions in appropriate categories.

(sorry if I sounded a bit aggressive and frustrated.)

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#2

Not to mention posts like “I got hacked”

Those people are trying to act as if they are trying to alert others but thats simply not a thing to post in DD. Most members think DD is a place to post ANYTHING.

6 Likes
#3

I remember addressing a similar thread last year about the state of discussion, and literally to this day nothing has changed. In fact, it’s actually gotten far worse.

Anyways, I’d like to chime in with my two cents.
I think a lot of people are forgetting that theirs only so much that forum provides before your decisions are yours.

To clarify, there’s no inherent connection between clarifying the rules even further, or showing that you understand how to follow forum etiquette will lead to less garbage flooding in a category. Those that are actively abusing the system and those who aren’t aware they are abusing things are likely to not have read the rules and fail to follow the category expectations in the first place. Clarifying the rules and actively adding these things are just pointless. There’s nothing hard about understanding the concept of making reasonable posts. Users know this, but choose instead to not follow this concept. So it’s an issue with the end user, not the forum.

Frankly, I think that the current rules are not ambiguous. Why would I want to know about someone’s subjective opinion on “what music I prefer” ? that’s not of any use to me and other developers (doesn’t contribute to developers), yet topics like this are created a million times.

What I would want to see instead is a focus on fixing the issue itself: Target audience is not specific enough

To make matters worse, flags that should be rightfully flagged are seen as okay by the moderators. I’d question if this is due to workload of flags increasing, or whether moderators are just starting to be more loose on the moderation here.

So once again, this sort of garbage flooding is an issue that the forum can’t really control, but the users can. More experienced developers will be leaving the forum, and discussion will be no longer a category where you can collaboratively contribute to insightful discussions.

6 Likes
#4

On top of this, we need actual proper enforcement of the rules and (very lax) restrictions that there already are.

Many MANY times over the past couple weeks, I’ve been noticing posts that are incorrectly approved after being flagged in the past, and I need to specifically pick “Something else” and state the rules/restrictions being broken for the post to get taken down. Occasionally even then it gets handled by a lazy mod who doesn’t take the post down after apparently “reading” and responding to the report. I would rather not have to do the mods job for them by stating the very commonly broken rules over and over when reporting, and would especially prefer if the mods who are allegedly doing their job actually do their job.
(And no, none of these posts were edited at the time of reporting, which completely rules out editing to evade flags and auto post hiding. These were all approved by moderators.)

I can also point out far too many posts which are off topic (and flagged as such) with zero action taken on them to this day, and I am unable to flag as “Something else” because they were never even incorrectly approved, they’re just sitting in a limbo of permanently flagged with no moderators touching it with a ten stud cylinder.

One thing is for sure though, I can name one specific moderator who does their job spectacularly, and any time I see their name appear as a reply to my “Something else” I know they’ve done their job. If they do see this they probably know who they are, and a huge thank you to them. Keep up the amazing work.
If any of you here commonly have to pick something else to report posts for, you probably know who I’m talking about.

4 Likes
#5

I’m sorry however this is becoming redundant, again, as long as the Roblox Developer Engagement Team, dosen’t have any proper system, to replace the Post Approval system, what you’re proposing for better management and better moderation, is going to be hard, and you should also consider the fact that the Developer Engagement Team is only a small number compared to a large number members of this community and is still growing, and it’s going to be hard for them to properly moderate and control the #development-discussion category, which also resulted in them loosing a little with the imposition of the rules in the #development-discussion category, which sometimes you see that you should be deleted, isn’t deleted sometimes even when flagged, however, as far as now, I’ve see the moderation team has been doing a better job, especially for the newer members of the Developer Engagememt Team in removing posts that shouldn’t be in the #development-discussion, however we can’t really fully say the solution is solved since we still see many off-topic posts in #development-discussion, and again, it’s only a small team compared to a large community.

I’m also kind of disappointed because sometimes posts that are supposed to be flagged, aren’t even flagged by most of the community anymore, and I’m saddened to see that the loosen up of the rules also caused newer members of this forum to not even distinguish whether or not to flag a topic, and we kind of see it now that some people reply to that topic instead of flagging.

We need restrictions imposed in the topics similar to the Post Approval system, and it’s better recommended that we wait, until then, our only temporary solution is flagging

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