I cannot be the only new developer to get really annoyed with how this forum system works. Moreover, I am alluding to the fact that some categories are locked to new members and you have to go through some sort of approval process.
First of all, why does this forum have certain categories in which the general populace has to go through some long process to get there post approved. Isn’t the entire point of a forum to be a open platform in which one can ask questions to get viable feedback. I understand that there has to be some sort of moderation system or else the forum would get cluttered with a wide array of useless topics, but isn’t that the whole point of the flagging system.
Second of all, why is the approval process conducted by a bunch of volunteers rather than professional individuals that work at the corporation.
I do understand that the forum wants to keep certain category locked so they can focus on more pressing issues but I do believe that the flagging system is more than accurate. The reason why i am making this complaint is that I am tired of in the past trying to get my posts approved and they never do. Recently I made a post, that had to get approved, to the engineer bugs category, it has been hours of waiting and I am trying to talk to the approval person and he is taking hours or long minutes to reply between each message.
I know I cant be the only new developer to feel this way. Anyways I just wanted to make this post to bring to a light a situation that needs to change.
Edit:
I just wanted to agree with some of the comments about the spamming of some categories if this were to happen, and point out another solution would be to speed up the approval process.
This definitely isn’t the first time something like this was brought up. If you joined Roblox somewhere in the 2010 era, you would surely know the official forum on the roblox website itself, however due to how it was setup long ago (official roblox employees are moderators, post contents were filtered and bot posts and replies. This forum that we have now is trying to avoid that, this is a professional community and we, as much as you do, want it to stay that way. FYI the people behind the moderating are volunteers, they aren’t paid to moderate posts on the forum, so please be thankful for that. They are more than qualified to be part of the post approval and moderation team, Roblox doesn’t just accept volunteers, they are carefully chosen. Roblox employees don’t do much of the maintenance because this isn’t their job, they have better things to do than keeping this forum in order. This forum is pretty much community maintained than Roblox maintained.
The features request and bug report category is locked for new members because this is where Roblox engineers look at actively. They don’t have time to waste with posts that can’t be understood or has no point to begin with. This is for efficiency and most workplaces have the same standards.
I was in your position not so long ago, I too was frustrated with the post approval, but it took me a while to realise the bigger picture that it was very much necessary. Think of it as a learning process to create on point posts that engineers/the community can easily comprehend. I’m not saying that your posts are poorly composed, however you do learn a thing or two from the people who go through your posts before it reaches a bigger audience. It doesn’t happen in a day that the post approval process will magically disappear or you getting promoted to a full member, everyone has gone through the process and it’s pretty much the grand thing about the forum. So before you start complaining about how the forum is setup, think about the people who actually spare time just to keep it in place for everyone to benefit from.
Big no! Those two categories are one of the few that are visited often by the Roblox’s engineering team and the quality of the posts there is naturally kept at a high level. Having to spam them with the same low quality posts like many new members do in the help and feedback category cough#help-and-feedback:building-supportcough will be only adding more work for the staff to be sifting through it.
And in addition to that, staff members would more likely stop reading the topic due to the random nonsense that would be posted. Even if there is a bug, important bug that needs to be fixed, staff most likely ignore it because new members could post there. And don’t get me wrong, some new members are trustworthy and reliable, but some on the other hand, ( not calling any names) aren’t.
kinda OT but I need to address it That would be too discriminatory. I know a few New Members that know how the forum works and how the posts should be composed but don’t have the time to be pursuing the Member status here due to real life or projects. Please don’t throw this argument around… remember that you‘re a new member too…
As a person who has started as a member (on the day of when what is now known as new member), has become top contributor and very recently joined post approval, I want to express how I feel about your remarks.
From new members to community sages, we dedicate our time and knowledge to this forum. It could be for any number of reasons and it should be respected and understood.
The other people here have expressed great reasons why it is like it is. New member as a role is effectively has a low barrier to entry and thus in areas where that low barrier contradicts with areas of high attention from those who require it, a small and simply barrier is put up.
Of course there are new member who know this well and find it an unnecessary barrier and should be promoted but aren’t for any number of reasons.
Post approval take the time out of their day to help make this as fast as they can without taking their entire lives. Who all do things outside of these forums, could be work education or any other reasons.
I don’t enjoy how you implied that PA is unprofessional, any unprofessionalism is internally discussed and handled. That was a single case, not an overall view of the system.
Think about it from the side of Roblox, would you like to be constantly notified of topics which simply don’t meet the standard and you need to check up on that it meets the requirements. That’s unnecessary time wasted.
DevRel do handle things like flags but DevRel covers a lot of things across the entire of Roblox, the idea of DevRel should unnecessary increase their work rather than allowing volunteers doesn’t make sense to me. They changed events to DevOps for example.
If you could provide a better use case I would love to know.
Allowing new members to post these types of topics themselves would be a bad idea.
The programmers behind Roblox expect to find specific information in feature requests and bugs. If these were opened up to new members, a lot of incomplete posts would end up in there.
Go check out the #help-and-feedback category. A lot of topics there are posted by new members and often don’t come close to the stated guidelines within their respective subcategories.
I was once a new member and had to go through the post approval process multiple times and at first I didn’t see the point in this process. The post approval process isn’t there to just be annoying and a wall stopping you from posting in certain categories. The whole idea behind it is to improve your posting quality and get you used to how certain categories of the forum work.
Opening up the platform feedback categories wont help the forum at all because lots of new members will post unnecessarily and low quality feedback posts. Remember Roblox engineers actively look through these categories and don’t have time to read through a sea of low quality support posts. Each and every post in these categories needs to be on-topic, good quality and always adding something to the topic.
This is where the post approval process comes in to ensure that each post has good quality and filters out the unnecessary posts. New members should utilise this process more because it really helps increase the quality of your posts.
How would hiring professionals improve this process? Using volunteers is just as good because the professionals wont handle this process any differently. Using ‘veteran’ community members in some cases may be better because they already have a vast knowledge of the forum. Every person in the post approval group has been hand selected and know a huge amount about the forum.
If you hire professionals, even people from Roblox, you will probably still need to teach them how the forum works. Also, in most cases you would have to pay these sorts of people and I don’t think Roblox wants to do this for a process that can be ran by community volunteers.
This is a great point. There are many people in post approval who individually have over a decade of experience on Roblox in general, in addition to 5+ years of developer forum membership and participation. These qualities are arguably the most important prerequisites for a job such as this one, and a hiring manager would be hard-pressed to find candidates who fulfill them elsewhere.
How do you even begin to replace an amazing asset like @buildthomas? (Just an example, y’all are amazing)
Lots of people dedicated their time to make the DevFourms what it is today. To suggest he could be replaced seems far fetched and a complete disrespect of the people who do help and improve.
I’ll preface now that I have a slight bias as I never was a New Member and I’m currently in Post Approval. Just in case.
There is a very strong reason as to why New Members are unable to post bug reports and feature requests themselves. These categories are very valuable for engineer feedback and suggestions. They do look at that category and as such, they need to be able to access information quickly and in proper detail. It is because of this that a trust layer needs to be established.
As the DevForum is automation-based for membership, this means that anyone is capable of getting in rather than needing to apply. This also means that the potential for such important categories to get littered with unnecessary posts or badly formatted threads exists. Honestly it’d be great if Post Approval extended to Members as well but it’s the general sentiment that Members are familiar with the forums enough to handle creation of requests and reports threads themselves.
First and foremost, one of the chief jobs of Post Approval is to help New Members get acquainted with the DevForum and help them understand how best to write a report or when it’s appropriate or not to do so. It’s less of post approving and more helping New Members for future success when writing requests. A strong request can yield a stronger response from the community, which means a greater weight with engineers for consideration.
If anything, those who receive post vetting are more prepared for the future than those without, unless you’re capable of getting used to the ropes yourself as a Member. It’s better to look at the system for what it supports rather than what it supposedly prevents. Posts are given support from the entire team as well as Sages, all of whom are select users with an extensive understanding of the forum and are committed to your furthered success with posting on the DevForum. Getting feedback is often a good thing.
Unfortunately, flagging does not cut it as an alternative to Post Approval as they are two very different things; flags are a different complaint thst have been brought up before. Flags help keep categories clean from any bad posts, but they aren’t as effective in understanding the what or the why. Direct feedback from Post Approval or the message user option in the flag menu help the poster understand the what, possibly talk it out to get information or reach a common ground and all is well from there with a learning note to be taken away from it.
Frankly, that’s all I do want to say about this topic. I don’t want to go too far but at least supply enough about my two cents on the topic. Take it as you will.
There are new member restricted categories that redirect all posts in them to engineers. As a result, unless something were changed it wouldn’t be feasible to unlock those categories.
Additionally, having manual moderation like you’re suggesting is simply unscalable. At the time of writing, there are 245,000 people who have at the very least logged into the devforum once. If even a fraction of those people began posting, moderating their posts quickly becomes a fulltime job. While it’s possible to hire someone for that, it is far easier to just have a basic level of quality control on new members, preventing it from becoming a problem to begin with.
As others have addressed, there are a lot of times when the experience of volunteers outweighs the usefulness of having an actual staff member spend time looking at a post. Most members of developer engagement (the team that manages the forum) don’t have much experience with the engine and it would be hard for them to distinguish between bugs and user error quickly. There have been instances in Post Approval where I knew what the issue was immediately when someone reported a ‘bug’ and was able to work with them to quickly fix it instead of wasting the time of engineers.
Unfortunately your request is one of many, and we can’t reasonably get to all of them in a several hour timespan. Especially on a weekday. If the expectation is that we do not sleep or that we drop everything else going on to reply to your request and get it moved, that’s unrealistic. A majority of us are either high school or college students, and several of us work fulltime jobs in addition to doing post approval.
Generally, we try to get to requests as soon as possible. When they’re well constructed they move within a day. If not, they can typically take a few days depending upon how much work is needed on them and the response time from the thread OP. If you’re frustrated with the post approval time, the best way to lower it is to write threads that are good to go without any intervention on our part.
FWIW, if your post was properly made in the first place there wouldn’t be any back and forth and it would have been approved immediately. If anything, this demonstrates the post approval process is working.
And the hours it takes to get a post approved is nothing noticeable in the face of the weeks or months it may take for a feature or non-regression bug to be implemented/fixed, so having it submitted instantly doesn’t provide any practical benefit short of satisfying impatience
oh really the guy I was speaking with didnt tell I should have added anything to my post, he kept asking me questions and I gave him answers, her didnt say anything was wrong with my post. Secondly, he had the audacity to call me entitled and saying if I continue to reply like this no one is gonna one help me, so @railworks2@HaxHelper some of the people in post approval do I have excellent knowledge on the platform, but all of the ones I have experienced clearly dont. Honestly, I really appreciate the fact that you do have experienced ones like @buildthomas because he was the first person to tell me that something is wrong with my post.
The one thing I dont understand though is that the guidelines sent to be is not met by all the post in that category. So what I did was look at other post in the category when formulating mine. Honestly, I do believe that most post on this forum does not adhere to that strict guide and you guys are just trying to push my issue aside. If you want to get technical I can point out something missing in thousands of posts on the devforum that do not meet the strict set of rules, and some of them may even be your own.
I’m reading the request in question and can’t find any wrongdoing by the post approval team member (aside from calling you “entitled”, which was dealt with). The questions they were asking to confirm what you were posting was actually a bug or not–we don’t want to waste the engineer’s time and having them read bug reports for user errors or things caused by user made plugins.
We very clearly say in the rules (you read them when you joined the forum) that the time post approval takes is varied.
I’m not sure what you think our motive for targeting you specifically would be. The rest of post approval does go through the same process of confirming whether reports are actually bugs or not–the engineers wouldn’t read the bug reports if we didn’t.
I know but what I dont understand is why they were being so strict about my post, because I was reading through other posts in the category and they were much less detailed than mine, yet still permitted.
Considering the bug report is entitled “In game lighting error”, it’s not a stretch to assume you have funky lighting settings and didn’t realize it. I don’t see this as an issue with the post approval system, but as something an engineer would have had to test otherwise.
