On many occasions, I have observed moderators locking posts in Development Discussion with no provided reason. Often times, these are valid discussion topics with active discussions happening in them, when suddenly they will become locked for seemingly no reason.
Most of the time, they aren’t even unlisted (unless they are). Simply just locked as pictured below:
At the moment, flagging a topic in the category is almost a guaranteed takedown (lock or unlist) which is very problematic behavior. I think topics with active discussions should stop being randomly locked or hidden for using the category correctly. I’m not saying every topic locked and/or unlisted in the category is unfairly removed (i gave up creating topics there years ago) - but we need to stop taking down everything for seemingly no reason.
Unlike the main site the devforum is actually moderated by real people, sadly the quality of moderation has been on a downwards trend recently. This topic is not intended for bashing on moderators (forum or www), I simply want to bring light to the fact that it seems like many topics are being constantly locked even if they are actively being discussed
I got flagged and my post locked for making a development discussion post about an idea I wanted to discuss that I thought would make Roblox better but I got a message that I should use a sub category I did not have access to and could not use
I think the main issue is there’s no real consistency. There’s certain topics that I feel like should have been taken down years ago but continue to stay active for years (basically all the topics that are only vaguely related to developing, like “What’s the scariest thing you’ve experienced while developing”), yet other topics which seem more development related get axed really quickly.
The guidelines are too vague and whether your topic stays up is almost entirely decided by how what the mod who responds to the flag feels about it. It’s like roulette.
Roblox itself is not consistent about their moderation too outside of the devforum, I have a friend who got terminated for making a valk-related item when he thought those were fine since everyone else has multiple of them in their store
Ive noticed this too. Specifically the fact that some of these are random posts that have been active for a while. It would ofc be nice if a reason was provided.
Also, how is the one criticizing the innovation awards getting taken down
It would be pretty funny if this got taken down too. In my opinion moderation is unnecessary strict or just unreasonable.
In the end this is a place for ppl who are related to making games on Roblox. Of all things. So I don’t see the reason behind the strictness in moderation or the big amounts of it
I’ve also noticed this issue becoming especially common in Forum Help > Forum Questions where posts are getting locked but not hidden/removed (it’s most obvious there because that place is far quieter compared to DD)
I want to defend HakaiShin because they’re one of the few mods who does their job, and they do most of the work out of that too, but it does seem very weird that posts are (as far as I can tell) no longer being hidden.
In a lot of those cases I’ve noticed the topic has been solved, which while can be annoying, it probably isn’t bothering anybody as long as the topic has already been solved. I madd this topic because what is happening in development discussion just seems to be random locking of valid posts which are actively being used for discussion which is the entire point of the category.
Its most likely ai. every time my post gets taken down i keep getting the same generic soulless robotic responses. the messages are 1 by 1 the same. Also its always instant after someone false reporting these. I doubt these are real human
There’s been a lot of topics locked or delisted for what appears to be no reason. Instead of silently moderating posts they should at least state why it was unlisted/locked in the thread.
Also, don’t forget they delist and lock any posts about unionization. Lol.
Two of my topics in the Development Discussion were closed, but only one of them was unlisted. Both times, I received a DM from HakaiShin with the same title and almost the same text. No reason was given for why the topic was banned. That’s the problem. How can you improve your behavior on the Dev Forum if you don’t know how? And yes, I’ve read the Dev Forum rules. In my opinion, the topics didn’t violate them. Still, I could be doing something wrong. And that’s why the DM you receive should include a reason.
It’s so frustrating, man.
Edit: I once accidentally bumped a post, and it was deleted. Also, the DM I received included a reason for deleting the post. That was good! Why wasn’t that the case when my active topics were closed?
thx for using my post as an example
