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.
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)
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?
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)
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
