Open Sourcing Creator Docs!

Updates Announcements
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#1

Update November 2, 2023: As of today, the Engine API documentation has been added to the open source repository! You’ll now see the Edit button when reading those pages on create.roblox.com. We’ve merged a couple hundred pull requests already—some of them truly extraordinary—and can’t wait to keep working with everyone on making the documentation even better. Thank you!

Hi Creators,

We are excited to announce that the documentation at create.roblox.com is now open source on GitHub! We’ve heard from so many creators that they rely on documentation to bring their experiences to life and have great ideas for how to improve the content, but there’s no way for them to contribute.

Starting today, you can submit GitHub pull requests to tweak confusing wordings, correct inaccuracies, fix typos, or even add whole new pages. Permissive licensing means you can incorporate writing and code samples into your own projects.

Contributing

The first step to contributing is to read the documentation just like you do today. If you spot a problem or want to improve something, click the Edit button. You’ll be redirected to GitHub and asked to either create an account or log in. At this point, you can use GitHub’s web-based editor to make minor changes or do a full fork-clone-branch workflow for larger updates. The documentation team will review the pull request and work with you to incorporate it into our content.

If you’ve used GitHub before, the process should feel very familiar. If you’re new to GitHub, we’ve documented how to contribute in README.md.

Style

Using consistent language helps the documentation feel unified and cohesive, even if a large number of writers have contributed to it. We haven’t published a comprehensive style guide, but do have a number of broad guidelines in STYLE.md.

Licenses

The repository uses two open-source licenses:

  • Prose is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, so you can remix and adapt it into your own work as long as you provide proper attribution.
  • Code samples are available under the MIT License so that you can freely incorporate them into your experiences.

What if I want to report a bug?

No changes to bug reports—we still gratefully accept them in the Bug Reports forum.

What’s next?

For now, we have the creator guides, and the Engine API documentation is coming soon NOW LIVE. We’re also looking to further streamline the contribution process, along with adding new ways for creators to write and share knowledge that might not have a home within the documentation.

Lastly, we’re excited to build a stronger feedback loop with the community and make it easier to report documentation bugs.

Stay tuned for more information. Thank you!

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#2

This topic was automatically opened after 11 minutes.

#5

Would this include a home for things like specs for file formats? Right now, the community maintains separate documentation for these things but as a result information is scattered and sometimes outdated. It would be great for everyone involved if Roblox were willing to act as an official home for these sorts of documents.

It’s been indicated before that Roblox doesn’t want to host documentation for these formats because it views them as internal, but with the shift towards things like Open Cloud, I’m wondering if this has changed.

31 Likes
#7

So is it a 100% copy of the actual site or are some thing different?

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#8

Anything open source on a proprietary platform is a win :slight_smile:
Thanks.

22 Likes
#9

This will help solve a lot of outdated information and deprecated objects found in snippets, thanks!

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#10

Besides some documents that we’re required to control, all guides and articles are in the new repo. Edits in this repo will be deployed to the production website for all to see!

We’ll soon be migrating API references docs to open source as well.

15 Likes
#11

Does this mean we can finally have a search function and ability to type the page number we want to jump to instead of clicking next on the decals page 35 times?

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#12

Hi Dekkonot, we’re thinking of it more as a way to surface the best of the sort of content you currently see over in the Community Tutorials forum. The documentation has to have a pretty strict review policy, so we want a slightly more “official” way for people to write about the things they’re most passionate about. People find novel uses for all sorts of tools, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the community uses any new mechanisms to share information on things like file formats, but not really our intent. Hope that clears things up somewhat!

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#13

This is awesome! I am a firm believer in open source software and I am excited to see the community continue to improve the creator documentation!

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#14

This update is so helpful and excellent! Thank you so much <3

My only concern, what will you do to combat AI generated content using pieces of software such as Google Bard and ChatGPT?

11 Likes
#15

{Edit: It seems I was mistaken to anyone who see this. I am keeping the message so that readers are not seeing blank replies and so on.}

This seems like it would immensely helpful however, I cant help but believe that this is out of laziness. Perhaps if this was to be properly incorporated, the top community resources as well as suggestions from the community would be collated by Roblox to create an official yet representative document. Not to mention, a lot of Roblox developers would not necessarily use GitHub, as roblox is generally an engine for beginners alike. How will Roblox make sure people are aware of these open source documentations?

[Edit 2: This appends the actual Roblox official documentation therefore, I think this is legitimately a good addition. Albeit; I am still of the opinion that community resources and such should be collated by Roblox into the documents as opposed to having players do everything themselves.]

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#16

If you are a beginner, writing on the Creator Docs probably isn’t a great idea… GitHub is used by millions and although some people may not use it, it’s the best place for stuff like this

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#17

Honestly, if it works, it works. It’s impossible to detect AI generated content (unless the user wrote a terrible prompt) anyways.

9 Likes
#18

Well I couldn’t disagree more. The intentions here seem far from “laziness”.

If there weren’t constant updates to the docs, perhaps I’d agree. But I’ve seen massive effort on Roblox’s side to improve the docs.

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#19

My point is not to write on the document, but to see it.

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#21

I don’t see as to why they wouldnt collate user suggestions into the official documentation rather than making a derivative.

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#22

You can see the docs by opening the Roblox Docs site…? Platform Overview | Documentation - Roblox Creator Hub

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#23

So they are updating the official documents? I thought that this would be a wikipedia style thing where a copy of Robloxs original documents are made accessible to players. I see now. My bad for misunderstanding.

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#24

Looks cool! Will we be able to get access to the reference pages too? E.g. documentation on individual classes, such as BasePart.

7 Likes