I wanna say that by my OP I was not promoting completely banning new members from the recruitment thread; rather I propose adding post approval to that thread so as to create a higher quality of post.
I understand that many of the people on this forum are not full members; i even fall into this category since I am a new member. I would be losing a considerable privilege, but that’s just what the ability to post in any category is: a privilege. I think there is sufficient evidence by scrolling through the recruitment category to say that new members in general do not yet meet the level to have this privilege unrestricted.
I want developers to be able to get help for their projects, but the amount of poor quality posts makes it hard to find help. I’m willing to give up this privilege in order to make people’s overall experience better.
To address two points in @monorust brought up in his first post, yes, a forum rank is not a fancy title, it’s something that shows we trust you with certain privileges. I don’t feel new members meet that level of trust, given the plentiful evidence from multiple categories. Asset Marketplace was just one pool to grab from, recruitment and portfolios are also sliding into that path. I would rather we have our privilege restricted so that the quality overall bumps up than any other alternative.
The second point I want to address is the rhetoric he used to portray his solution to the problem: see if the topic concerns you, and then if the pay is good. This, I feel, is far too optimistic, for lack of a better term. The reason is that most people aren’t going to think like that, and short of moderating the quality of posts being made, we cannot force them to think in that manner. Most forum members are 13-18, and it takes time to develop that logical mindset through experience. Therefore, even if you claim this is the rhetoric one should use when scrolling through the recruitment posts, the only way to efficiently achieve that state across most members is a moderation system for the posts. This system is called post approval.
I am glad to see this discussion taking off, and please feel free to refute my points or add your own!
I don’t think the recruitment category will fully benefit from having post approval because I can see lots of new members not wanting to post there anymore. The person posting the recruitment topic knows more about the job offer than any of the post approval members do. This means the post approval members wont be able to give much advise on pricing or the contents of the topic because they don’t know the ins and outs of the project. All they will be able to is suggest to read these topics to add in any information they have missed: Template for Recruitment topics and About the Recruitment category.
It is best to ignore these sorts of ‘low-quality’ recruitment topics. If you come across a topic in the recruitment category that you don’t think is following the category rules by all means flag it and explain in the “Something Else” section your reasoning.
I think a lot of new members don’t fully understand why the post approval process is in place and it’s benefits. The post approval process is designed to improve your posting quality and teach you how to post in the categories the require post approval like in platform feedback. Whilst being a new member you should take advantage of using the post approval process to prove you can post in the categories you don’t have access to and to improve your posting quality. This should help you rank up to full member because you have proved through post approval you can post in the restricted categories on your own.
Being a full member shouldn’t be seen as a status symbol or show you are a better developer than a new member. The full member rank just shows you are trusted to post in all the categories of the forum on your own. To put it into perspective, I was once a new member and now a full member and I have never released a game or done anything extra on the Roblox site to gain full member. I was active on the forum and took advantage of the post approval process.
Full Member doesn’t mean you’re famous or even a good developer. As buildthomas said, it literally just means you are trusted with posting quality content. New members are not yet trusted with that in all categories, but are on their way to being trusted, so post approval is a way for them to post to these categories to increase their trust level, without making it an open free-for-all mess.
Your membership to the devforum is not a measure of your “fame” or “proficiency”.
While I agree with your general sentiment, the issue is that major details are not being provided in a lot of recruitment posts. It’s not about post approval knowing more about a project idea or pricing; it’s that they know it has to be listed in some of way.
I do agree that there should be a post approval on this category because one, there has always been a problem with people spamming/making topics that don’t give a reasonable amount of information. Two, I believe some new members don’t understand the correct payment because they choose not to look over the forum for ideas and show this by offering an unreasonable amount of for a job.
I would approve of this because like BanTech said, Members are just trusted a lot more, they get the role because of there part they give to the community. Under no circumstances would being a member make you more special than a new member other then being trusted more.
I do agree with this is a problem but at the same time that does not mean you should make it so only Members can post in there mostly half of Dev forum is New Member and they are Dev’s. Just trying to find people to do a job or looking for a job to limited it to just Members is just unfair that all so means that Members will only (Mostly) be the only people getting the jobs and at that point what’s the point of being on Dev Forums at that point? I don’t see the point of getting people to Approval what you post in Recruitment as a community we should handle something like this and tell people what there doing wrong and not put it on only people. Because, we feeling lazy or just don’t want to be say nothing. As a community we should at least handle these things and of cause there are all way’s going to be people doing this. We are humans do all most 55% of things wrong All the Time. New Members are New Members they are NEW they are just getting a feel of somethings and if is something that big why don’t they just put it into the tutorial? To make sure they know what they are doing?
My main point is that why can’t we handle it like we all way’s do. (Mostly) With flagging it has spam? Or tell the person what are we doing wrong? Or have it put into the tutorial to make sure they know how to post in each Topics?
This is something like this I posted a long time ago.
Spam flagging doesn’t solve the issue because it never informs the offender of how to fix their issue. Only a comprehensive system for reviewing posts to ensure they meet the standards of the forum is going to be effective. And if every single forum member goes and tells someone why their post is missing information, the vast majority are going to be pissed off. We don’t have the power, as individual members, to make these kinds of suggestions to other players. If you’d rather we have a tutorial to teach member how to post I am behind that, but personally I don’t think it’ll be as effective as post approval.
Also, I think you are making postnapproval out to be a red herring of sorts. Opponents of adding post approval to recruitment have not yet acknowledged that new members do get to post in recruitment still, just through post approval, and I want to make that clear. I don’t want it to be confused as a total ban on new members posting in the category.
The fact that it just seems unfair because, like I said what’s the point? Having someone approval and look through and if they find something wrong it’s going to be like this.
Person A: Sorry I find something wrong with this re-making.
Person B: What is wrong with it?
Person A: Sorry, but I can but I can not tell you.
Person B: …
Person B: Re-makes post
Still get’s denied.
Person B: Leaves Dev Forums.
At that point maybe we should have post approval #collaboration:portfolios since poeple do the (All most the same thing in) #collaboration:recruitment and that you need to be trusted. I don’t get making it so that your post needs to be approval because we don’t trust you and we have to make sure you are doing everything right within a post.
Sorry, if this came off of rude. Am not trying to be.
But see, it is my belief that we should be limited so that we can learn how to make quality posts. Post Approval is supposed to assist in that by having the members of post approval give the feedback required to make it adhere to standards.
This is likely not feasible in terms of workload for the post approval team. I think we would prefer that they focus their time on improving requests for the Platform Feedback category instead, that’s also a lot more interesting and constructive work over correcting Recruitment topics.
Do you have any other suggestions for improving the quality of posts in this category?
Ok I can understand that but again this is a Lego game we are not doing this for a grade people just want to fun with making games and just be limited to something because, it’s not a good post.
expand the post approval team. Not a popular idea, even with me. But it is a solution.
limit new members ability to post in recruitment category entirely. Again, not popular.
expand the tutorial to cover an extensive course on writing topics for particular categories so that its there, and prohibit anyone from becoming new members until they have completed that segment of the course.
I did mention in my OP that I did not know if it would be a larger burden on PA, and now that I know it will be, I think we need to consider more drastic solutions to a very real problem.
I have mixed opinions on this. Although it would definitely improve quality, new members needing to quickly hire someone would be turned off.
Dunno how this would work with Discourse limitations, but community approval. If a few people rate it as quality, then it would be automatically approved.
Edit: changed to community approval for added clarity
Private recruitment exists. It’s just used sparringly and when there isn’t a good reason for a wide audience.
Do post approval not give feedback to posts that do not meet the quality bar?
@CaptLincoln - Your post was a great read and yes - there are some very low quality posts in Recruitment, however I do not agree that we should make it subject to the post approval process. If you see a post that you think breaks forum or category rules, you should flag it.
You can (and should!) message users if you have any feedback about their post.
People should be able to collaborate without a barrier to entry, as long as you can accept and understand the basic rules of the forum.
The Discobot tutorial is very helpful to new users, but I suspect how many actually compete it as (iirc) you need to be a new member [at minimum] to fully complete the tutorial (and the tutorial starts… when you join the forum)
You could also argue that there are technical difficulties with modifying the tutorial, but I can’t speak on those.
The flag system acts as a community moderation system. Hiding bad posts and locking topics that are getting a bit too heated.
How would this function with bad posts? For people to rate it as ‘of quality’ and for it to be approved, people need to see it.
When most people suggest community moderation, they mean downvotes - not community approval.
relatively off-topic, but no it’s not. roblox isn’t even a game. don’t call it that. you don’t make large companies off a ‘lego game’ unless you’re the publisher.
Public recruitment should not become Member+. The name is literally ‘Public Recruitment’.
If you dislike public recruitment and only want to hire good forum users (not necessarily top devs), Private Recruitment is here for you.
yes - this post was a minor rant. there are a few good reasons for posting in private recruitment, however, collaboration should stay as is for the sake of the community.
my entire post was arguing in favour of keeping collaboration as is.
for a job.