Having been someone who watched this site go from private to public, I can assure you this has never been the case. Even as early as 2014 there were already troublemakers on the site. Rather than deal with it diplomatically however, staff members used to just outright ban said player who caused trouble permanently. Here’s an example if you don’t believe me.
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I mean, I completely understand. I’d say those type of events took place because the audience back then were way more mature than it is now, because obviously the forums welcomes anyone so it doesn’t really matter.
Hopefully none of that offended anyone in any way shape or form, I’m just trying to get my point across.
Please don’t assume that we banned said user over a single incident.
EDIT: Oh you were pointing out someone who was not nice and we banned I think. Reading comprehension for the lose.
Additionally, back then we had engineers like myself also be part of the moderation team for the forum. We used to have weekly meetings to discuss the state of the forum and whether we need to do something about users or not.
Now-a-days there is actually a dedicated team to managing this place, and lucky for me, I am no longer part of moderation here.
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I’m aware that said user was known to cause trouble from time to time, moreso than he did in the replies to that topic. My intent wasn’t to ‘assume’ the user was banned for such incident, but to point out to @anxyeity that people were still being ‘judged’ for their actions back then, albeit a different way than today.
Obviously since that time there have been a barnstorm of changes to the forum, and like you stated, the site now has it’s own dedicated team…but that doesn’t extinguish the fact that the forum has had it’s share of bad apples throughout it’s life, even when it was just getting off the ground.
There seems to be a common misconception that this forum was a ‘nicer’ place before it went public. While the discussions here were much more professional earlier in the forums life, you could still get a polarizing reply from just about anybody here if you said the right things.
Oh I misread your post, sorry.
I think the sentiment stems from the following ideas:
- Back then a lot more developers, product managers, and engineers were willing to share their ideas on the Dev Forums. There was a lot more 1 on 1 conversation between people actually developing the features and Roblox Dev Forum members.
- Because it was more private, those like myself felt a little more comfortable communicating with Devs like I would communicate with a friend, casually.
I still remember when point #1 was eroded. Someone was talking about a feature they were considering for some time in the future to a few select sub forums here. Somehow this got leaked to public without any context, suddenly twitter fires up with people telling Roblox that this is a terrible idea.
I still remember an internal feeling of betrayal over this and a few staff members essentially said “never posting my thoughts there again”.
I definitely no longer feel like I can be myself on here either due to its sheer size and impact. Everything I post usually has a personal PR filter on it and that can start to feel impersonal. And I can imagine, how some users feel the same way too.
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You really hit the nail on the head there, damn.
Adding onto this a bit, the forum was also constructed at a time in which Discord had yet to be developed. I don’t think it can be understated how much of an impact Discord actually had on the Roblox community. Players were able to openly communicate in a way that only here and the ROBLOX IRC Chat (remember that?) could provide at the time.
I think that once the ceiling was sort of ‘blown off’ so to speak, this place lost a bit of it’s luster. Combine that with the infamous ‘RBXDev Leaks’ Twitter page which essentially led to the site upgrades we have now, and you have a community that is essentially a shell of what it once was, at least on a personal scale.
I mean yea there used to the basic user thing back in the day but by “all of us we’re there” I meant that we all didn’t really know how the site operates til we actually had people show us what’s right and wrong. I still remember the “So I guess we’re all basic bees” you told me at RDC
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At the same time, the hand-picked niche community we built at the start couldn’t last. As Roblox grew there had to be a more organic way to get people in here. In a way it did cost personal interaction, but more people have access to all the great things this community has to offer, which I like to look at as an overall win.
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