Please make every members be able to post feature requests

[NoobFragged]

I never claimed to know everyone involved’s motivations, but I am also not a fool and I’m far more open to reality than it seems you are as you clearly took what I said personally.

If we can’t have a discussion about the toxicity that was in posting approval or the veteran community at large, then we can’t have a real discussion, because that absolutely was very real and I’ve seen nothing to indicate anything has changed.

I 100% understand problems with scale. Yes, that implementation is an actual thing. However, especially for a publicly traded company, the “only solution we have” can’t be nepotism. Hand-picking who they want to hear from or who gets opportunities. If you can’t acknowledge the nepotistic traits that have been previously displayed and still are today, then once again, this isn’t a real conversation because you are not capable of acknowledging real things that happen despite your not feeling that way about it.

There is no universal good. Just the same as there are many good people at Roblox and within the regular+ community, there are also toxic people with horrible beliefs. I’ve personally seen much behind the walls of regular+ sections, I have real friends that are part of these. While I’ve been on this platform a long time, I know many people who’ve been on it much longer.

I’ve seen group discussions of veterans bashing the idea of professional developers while they form professional teams of their own. I’ve seen veterans openly on the forum bash new developers and refer to them as a bunch of 10-year-old kids and scammers. I’ve seen these people refer to adults on the platform as pedos while many of them are adults.

Early while I was learning to develop, I hired a lot of people, mostly from this forum, to help me by making templates, and resources. Some helped me just by teaching or answering questions. I didn’t speak to 1 or 2 or 3 isolated people, I’ve spoken to countless. I’ve worked with more developers than I could even count.

If you do not think the outside perception of this forum from developers, real developers, is bad, you should at least try to open your eyes or not bother speaking about things you don’t know. If you don’t think there are absolutely well-founded reasons why many legitimate developers have disdain for the way these things are handled, once again, you should open your eyes.

I am not so ignorant as to clump all people together. I am also not blind to realities, some of which have been openly expressed, and others expressed a little less openly. At the end of the day though, facts are facts and that’s all there is to it.

Roblox has failed for almost two years to do anything to allow a single developer a fair opportunity to move up and be able to have a voice on this platform. They have done nothing to create any criteria for advancement.

I don’t care if it’s arbitrary or not honestly. Anyone that thinks the only ones that have anything to contribute to this platform, suggest, etc. are a bunch of old veteran members, is a fool.

You should not need to be a popular influencer or part of some inner circle to have a voice on this platform.

Posting approval made me give up on bug reporting it was so ridiculous. You can call that maintaining quality, but it was a joke, one that I personally experienced trying to submit legitimate bugs that impacted my team and many others.

I have suggestions I would like staff to consider. I would like to be able to bring this stuff and have staff look at it or consider it without having to go through insane routes to get them to do so.

You see, I’ve gone to great lengths to improve this platform. Do you have any idea how much work, how many people I had to talk to, and what it has taken for me to speak to staff about important issues?

I am the one that made staff aware that there was a problem with image moderation and textures that was fundamentally broken. I’m the one that pointed out that the auto filtering for flagging images had like a 85% chance of picking up specular maps and metallic maps on PBR layers and that the moderation staff was not trained to address them, so people were not only getting their images falsely flagged, but also getting denied appeals on moderation.

I care a great deal about this platform and those I’ve worked with on it. I pour my heart and my time into this. I develop full-time now, so this isn’t a hobby anymore, and I absolutely dread the day I have to apply to DevX.

One of the things I would like to suggest is a major security issue that would help any developer that cares about it with very little work on the part of staff. One that depending on the level they were willing and able to implement/reimplement it, could help countless developers reduce the risks of theft of their assets. Something that I have a very personally invested interest in myself and it’s much simpler than a lot of what they are doing on other ends of this, so it would be a great addition to their efforts.

I see what gets posted now. Clearly, only letting the veteran click make suggestions isn’t exactly producing some fictional pool of only quality results and winners. So this thing they are trying to avoid exists anyway.

It’s very very hard to feel valued on this platform. When you’re not part of the special club, it’s much harder. Especially when you know some trivial bug or oversight that you can’t even make suggestions about improving or fixing could easily get your account banned and it’ll be a coin toss as to whether you ever get it back.

[PeZsmistic]

Telling you that you’re saying completely false information does not imply I am taking anything personally, I have no time to fight with you about petty nonsense. You’re saying a lot of things that are entirely made up WRT the motivation behind things being the way they are, and then wishing for Roblox to read what you’re saying and make changes. This is not going to have the effect you’re hoping for.

The state of the community is not good, the state of developer feedback is also not good; it’s ridiculous we’ve waited so long for improvements in the flow here. Feature requests and bug reports are sparse and stuck to a very small pool of active users. We need changes absolutely, but you are not accomplishing that by making emotionally charged essays with assumptions about why things are the way they are. Your case stories are valuable, we know the community is brutal, but we need to focus on what is real to arrive at solutions that work rather than surrounding these with tinfoil hat assumptions like “Roblox doesn’t want our feedback and sabotages creator feedback on purpose”.

A lot is happening behind the scenes and long term plans and ideas exist. There are reasons why things are happening or are not happening, even if they do not appear to benefit us optimally. If we need improvements in certain parts of the developer community WRT collaboration, feedback, etc. then the only way to get that is to make accurate, generalizable, and concise arguments for those improvements.

[NoobFragged]

We’re not part of that discussion, and hence the problem at hand.
Facts are facts, interpretation is subjective.
It is not a made-up assertion that Roblox does not want us to be able to move up.
In fact, when you have a 24 billion dollar company that no doubt has heard this very issue brought up countless times, therefore you are certainly aware of it, having done nothing at all to do makes that a pretty reasonable conclusion.
If they wanted to, they would.
“Want” in this situation is not some feeling in your belly like “I want world peace”
This is a big company with a lot of money and resources.
If it had any real priority, it would be done.

So putting something at the bottom of some “to-do-list” that who knows when it will ever be handled without so much as posted updates or allowing those most impacted to be able to contribute or make suggestions… this does not leave an impression of “want” that anyone externally will feel validates them at all.

When Roblox does something like removing posting approval, our only possible avenue to move up, and then does nothing to address it for years. That is an act of intent. That is something that was done knowing there would be consequences. I had to once again work very hard to get them to even acknowledge that this circumstance existed. An action such as this is not an accident, hence why I used the term “on purpose”.

I get that they haven’t just abandoned it and they’re not keckling in the background saying “haha, fools”. That doesn’t mean they’ve shown us any respect, priority, or even concern for the way this impacts us. In fact, they as a whole largely ignore us except for the occasional canned message that looks like something a moderator copied/pasted.

People come and go, and even vets leave, so I do totally understand that Roblox is losing its source of feedback in a lot of areas. It’s just hard to have any sympathy for that at all when they have countless developers which could assist with this stuff, but have absolutely no way of doing so.

When I went to the lengths I did to get staff attention to the PBR texture issue, that was an insane amount of effort I don’t expect most people to do. I did it because I had legitimate fear my account was going to be permabanned just for uploading map textures, which almost happened.

I would love to have my time here spent discussing developer issues, having productive conversations, and contributing more to the platform.

That is very hard to do when the environment is a mix of a large group of people angry they have no voice and feel unvalued mixed with a group of people who do not share that struggle telling them all the reasons they’re essentially sick of hearing about it.

There are a lot of good developers here trying to contribute. There are a lot of new developers here trying to learn. So far, this environment doesn’t appear to be suitable for either of those things which often makes many of us wonder why we’re here.

Of all the developers I work with today. Of all those I talk with off platform and discuss things with, I don’t know a single one that still uses this forum, not even one, and I’ve asked every single one of them. In fact, I don’t even know a single one that has anything positive to say about this forum at all. When I talk to people on HD or Hidden Devs or any of these other groups, it’s pretty universally seen that those platforms exist largely because this forum is seen as not helpful, and all developers have things we need help with.

I’m sure you’re a great dev despite being pezsmistic. Unfortunately, this forum does not have an environment where meeting would be likely under better circumstances. Regardless, I hope you understand that you’re looking at our issue from the other side of the wall. Our feelings are not just stuff we make up in our head, they are directly caused by actions that lead us here.

Sure, that doesn’t speak to the actual motivations behind things, but then again, it’s not like we’re given anything to lead us to believe otherwise either.

By accident I saw I could post in a section I could not previously. I got excited like a kid at Christmas that I might be able to make my suggestion now. I was pretty bummed and let down when I couldn’t.

When I searched the forum trying to see if I could gather what was going on, well, these conversations are where that search led me. This brought back some old, and still active wounds I’d like to one day see mended here.

[PeZsmistic]

@NoobFragged

When Roblox does something like removing posting approval, our only possible avenue to move up, and then does nothing to address it for years. That is an act of intent.

This is faulty thinking, and the root of what I’m talking about.

Roblox moves priorities around very mercilessly according to very long term plans. Things that negatively impact developers are never done with the intent to hurt; sometimes things need to end and there are just no resources available to fill the void in the meantime, or long term plans make further work on something a waste (IMO Roblox looks way too far ahead, 2+ years is an unacceptable length of time for a void to exist), but this is the way the company currently works. There is no ill intent, just difficult prioritization (and this is something we can give feedback about). Taking it personally is not the way forward.

Further, post approval was not removed. It was sunset because it was entirely volunteer created and driven, and we could no longer keep up with the amount of usage the program was seeing without spending an unhealthy amount of time working on the queue. This was not avoidable.

I have nothing more to say though, I just wanted to address the incorrect assumptions about intent and motivation.

[NoobFragged]

Once again, you misinterpret my words.

I did not claim a motivation nor did I say what outcome the intent was for.
If I went to the store and I shoplifted, the repercussions, if I got caught, would not soul search my heart.
I could have been stealing for a starving kid outside, that wouldn’t be relevant.
At the end of the day, I did something, I did it knowing the consequences.
That IS the definition of intent.
I never claimed their intent was to shut us out.
However, that is what happened.
They knew it would happen, made the decision (regardless of reason), and then failed to prioritize any resolution.
It wasn’t an accident or an oops, it absolutely was an intentional act performed knowing what it meant.

The disenfranchised community of developers and negative feelings regarding this subject are a direct result of these actions. Roblox knows this, and continues the course of not resolving it.

People often come here when they have a problem. That’s a thing. They should not be surprised when they can’t get heard or get the problem addressed that people get a little peeved about it.

That is part of the decision they made.

Once again, I’m not saying what their intentions are, I’m simply saying it was intentional. All these people complaining are a result of that intentional act regardless of whatever motivations someone had for doing so.

[Hooksmith]

Hey @NoobFragged thanks for sharing the frustration. Please refer to my post here if you haven’t seen it yet: Members should be able to post in regular areas, until regular promotions come back - #139 by Hooksmith

We’re well aware of the accessibility issue and are now planning to iteratively address it in the next few quarters. This includes making the feedback process available to anyone that uses any platform feature, while still being able to provide meaningful feedback to you folks. The main reason why this was challenging to do before is that we have a very unique relationship with our community and we want to make sure we can retain that kind of level of involvement when we scale up the feedback workflow further, and we didn’t have the right resources and teams set up to do this earlier.

If you have any forum-specific suggestions feel free to post in #forum-help:forum-features, I watch every post in that category and I personally care a lot about resolving this issue to make things right.

[Malus_Lupus]

I know I’m extremely late here, but I am responding because I still have not personally seen any change regarding this matter.

So, to clarify, Roblox did not have the necessary manpower to fully examine every suggestion or feature request (or any other discussions along that same line), and due to that, posting was limited?

Just earlier today, I was creating a feature request on google docs with sources, explanations, and everything, but realized I could not post in feature requests even though I have read over 2,600 posts and have been here for nearly three years.

[Hooksmith]

We’re close to resolving this for bug reports, we’ve yet to investigate entirely for feature requests.

Please refer to the other thread for some more discussion and see my other posts in this thread as well: Members should be able to post in regular areas, until regular promotions come back - #150 by Hooksmith

[Jab2Roblox (EpicJab)]

I’ve been here for even more days, with almost 40k posts read. I fully support this.

[VSCPlays]

I agree with this.

Back then there was a way, by contacting @Bug-Support, but since they silently “removed” the ability to send feature requests to the group without any announcement regarding the update at all

and the fact that many people here are flexing their stats and the fact that they didn’t get regular. Most of them just got weak stats, take a look at mine’s

[quixxspeedzonxbx (storm)]

Definitely agree,as many of the people ranked members have read lots of posts and solved situations,which is quite unfair to those people considering they arent Regulars still after all their contributions and help,I support this idea highly,with high hopes that Roblox brings light to this feature,as it would be helpful to many,and allow lots of chances for new features I do highly support this truly. But I agree with @VSCPlays,considering his stats are just legendary
-Good regards,Quixx

[NoobFragged]

@Hooksmith

We’re well aware of the accessibility issue and are now planning to iteratively address it in the next few quarters. This includes making the feedback process available to anyone that uses any platform feature, while still being able to provide meaningful feedback to you folks. The main reason why this was challenging to do before is that we have a very unique relationship with our community and we want to make sure we can retain that kind of level of involvement when we scale up the feedback workflow further, and we didn’t have the right resources and teams set up to do this earlier.

I apologize for not responding sooner, but it’s almost fitting when the time is considered, as the next few quarters have well past come and gone.

This “unique relationship” you speak of seems to be a comparatively small group of old members. While I certainly appreciate that scaling such things should certainly be done carefully to mitigate information flow, I feel it appropriate to state that that small group is by this time a minority on this platform, and maintaining that relationship has come at the expense of excluding the majority of developers for many years now.

It took the actions of one day to remove posting approval. In years since, there has been no change to this. I personally find the idea of Roblox caring about developers outside the old veteran’s club to be somewhere between depressing and comical at this point as that care hardly seems to extend beyond saying the words occasionally.

At this point, gaining a voice on this platform has become akin to membership in Bohemian Grove. At best a carrot to dangle for us hoi polloi.

While Roblox may value the relationship it has with the veteran members. It’s important to have a distinction here that this is the relationship they value. As far as most developers on this platform are concerned, Roblox has relatively no relationship with us at all. The veterans are treated as a privileged class on this platform and I’ve seen much of their responses which seem quite focused on keeping that status. I wholly do believe that Roblox values their relationship with them, but I don’t believe the exclusivity of that relationship is a good thing for anyone besides them.

[Hooksmith]

@VSCPlays

and the fact that many people here are flexing their stats and the fact that they didn’t get regular. Most of them just got weak stats, take a look at mine’s

@quixxspeedzonxbx

many of the people ranked members have read lots of posts and solved situations

Hey folks, our current philosophy for creator feedback access is that everybody who uses our creator tooling should be able to give feedback on that tooling. It does not relate to participation on the forum, so stats like read time, posts on forum, solutions etc. would not affect your ability to post feedback in the future. (that’s not to say you wouldn’t qualify otherwise, just wanted to clarify that forum statistics wouldn’t have any implication on your ability to send feedback)

[0Tenth (QuackBack)]

May I ask, how does the Roblox Support ideas and suggestions flow work? Does it get filed internally to the same place as feature requests, except with no DevForum topic attached?

[shadowflame63 (MiniiMann)]

I think the main issue right now is the confusion on what’s going on with ranks and permissions. We know there are plans to overhaul the system so it can handle larger capacities of users but we’ve been left in the dark for years now.

Other than getting an already accepted regular (or maybe a staff member) to post feedback on your behalf, how can a devforum member provide feedback appropriately?

There used to be post approval, that got removed for this presumed overhaul. Then there was @Bug-Support but feature requests are no longer accepted. Getting the regular rank is now extremely elusive with the only obvious method being via the Community Feedback Programme, and other answered being ‘invite-only’ and ‘Keep engaging on the forum and you will eventually automatically promote to Regular, even if it does take awhile.’

We’ve been told for a while that there’s planning for providing access to everyone to give feedback, but we haven’t actually been told anything about it. I think we just need some clarity on what the plan actually is rather than just being told that something is being done.

I understand that a solution to this problem is no easy task and takes time, but just knowing what’s going on would be nice. (I have a feeling that having the regular rank won’t play a role in the new system so that’s why the ranking system for it has been pretty much dropped)

[shadowflame63 (MiniiMann)]

Forgot to mention that replying to release notes and announcements is a good way to get some feedback in, and get some back from staff. However, you’ve got to be somewhat on topic, there’s a chance you get ignored, and it does feel a little desperate.

Also the big Q&A / AMA sessions are amazing, but far and few between which is a shame.

[VastChadJavelin (pepsi)]

I 100% agree with this, considering I barely get any help from the support page. However, there are some disadvantages of this, such as there being some trolls using the feature requests category to post troll requests, but at least I hope the Roblox staff can deal with them quickly, so I don’t think it’ll be that much of an issue, and letting members could probably improve Roblox even more and quicker!

[Hooksmith]

Outside of the process being completely different, the roundtrip is much, much longer when you file a bug report through our customer support avenue because there’s more layers of people involved there. On the forum you are likely to end up talking directly to the engineers who are responsible for the code. So it’s recommended to use the forum for providing feedback. See https://devforum.roblox.com/t/cant-post-bug-reports-or-feature-requests/2009361 for instructions as Member instead of Regular.

[Hooksmith]

@shadowflame63

and ‘Keep engaging on the forum and you will eventually automatically promote to Regular, even if it does take awhile.’

Thanks for sharing the screenshot and this quote, this messaging is outdated so I’ll reach out to remove it from the templates we use for answering these kind of questions.

As far as we are concerned internally we don’t really care about “trust levels” based on forum behavior anymore (outside of technically still needing it to gate access, but that’s really it) and what we’re working towards is instead “anyone who is an active user of a feature should be able to give feedback on that feature”. The best way to currently get access to feedback mechanisms is to be an active user of the product, provided we currently have limited capacity so we need to prioritize a bit on who we invite (but this will keep getting better over time).

[Hooksmith]

Yes we’re very aware of this problem and still working on this, thanks for raising it once again. Really appreciate your patience here and I fully understand this is a frustrating issue.

It’s not our long-term goal to limit the group of people who have access to feedback, ideally we open it up to all and we talk about this a lot internally as a goal, but it’s not as simple as just opening it up and hoping it all goes well. There’s a lot of constraints we have to work with mostly related to scale and SLAs. We want to make sure that when we do that we are still able to effectively address the feedback. Otherwise that is not respectful and misleading to the users who are spending time trying to give the feedback only for it to never land properly or never be addressed outside of being listed on the forum. With “unique relationship” I meant the ability to effectively address the feedback, not artificially limiting who has access to feedback.

It should also be noted that when I wrote that post we were primarily focusing on bug reports and not feature request improvements yet (I was replying to a few threads at once and missed that this thread is specific to feature requests, sorry!). We haven’t yet invested much effort into improving how we intake feature requests, that will be of more focus for this year. We’re also still shipping a bunch of things for bug reports that also relate to expanding access.

We have done significant improvements outside of “feature requests” to give you an opportunity to comment on our roadmap and direction, with the Roblox Creator Roadmap and with AMAs (1, 2) with our engineering/product leadership.

For the “feature requests” forum category, we really want to make sure we are getting this right and we’re not just opening up broadly avenues of feedback that aren’t really working well. The current category isn’t working perfectly either for the people that do have access as you might have been able to tell. It might be the case that we open it up in the future, or it might be the case that we revamp how this part of feedback works completely so it serves all users in a better way. There’s a lot of ways we’re thinking about how to better collect feedback that isn’t bug reports and we want to make sure we’re doing this right.