Which was my main point I was trying to come across.
Sir, under no circumstance am I “hating” on new members. Quite the contrary; I Am one myself. I don’t mean to come across otherwise.
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I said “several” I wasn’t intending to include you. I didn’t specify who because I didn’t want to call anyone out.
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This was essentially how people were originally invited into the Developer Forum a few years ago. You’d send in a request to join and then every few weeks a new round of about a dozen users would be added. Users could even suggest specific users to be invited in a mass post that the DevRel team would check every so often, but this eventually became exhausting to the forum staff, and became one of the main reasons that the forum was opened up to the public. I wouldn’t count on this type of application process to show up again due to those reasons, even though it was a really good way at combating unprofessional posts.
My apologies on the miscommunication, I thought that the forum would at least have a couple of staff members that help with the heavy lifting around here, as it seems like a major responsibility to just leave up to Trusted Users.
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My mistake. Forgive me, I thought you were including the original post.
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It’s all about finding a balance. Opening the floodgates to everyone isn’t an option - neither is gatekeeping.
Of course there’s a bias towards newer members - we have neither the reputation nor the credibility that others have. But that also doesn’t mean that we’re incapable of producing great things.
Below is an example of one of my topics, posted on the #help-and-feedback:cool-creations board. Mine is only one example. My January Project: The Perfect Example of how NOT to Build a Game
I don’t think that post approval is necessarily a bad thing - in fact, it would do quite a bit to make the best topics more visible. What I don’t want is locking down entire sections purely based on the fear of lower quality posts, with newer members being only able to see, and not comment.
In an ideal world, we would have a full, 24/7 team of moderators scanning through the forums and cleaning it up. Unfortunately, that isn’t possible currently.
There isn’t a right answer, only what you believe is the better solution. New members are able to act professionally, old members are able to act unprofessionally.
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I’m so glad you brought up the fact that new members are capable of making great content, because like yourself, I firmly believe that. I suggested this solution as a way to teach new members or those who struggle with adhering to the templates required information how to make great content.
EDIT: Also, I know post approval does not allow replies to topics. This is why I suggested mandatory contact information so all members can contact those who make recruitment topics. At that point the responsibility is on the individuals who contact the hiring director, not Roblox, to provide a mature and quality space for discussion, and thus out of our control.
FYI there is full functionality for post approval to also accept replies to topics and we do this a lot for feature requests and discussion topics already.
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Forgive me, I phrased that poorly. I meant it doesn’t allow for unrestricted replies to topics(ie the replies still have to go through PA).
Problems with the category
- When a thread is missing information or is low-quality it seems to attract a chain of low-quality replies.
- If the payment amount and method isn’t included in the OP I can guarantee the first few replies are going to ask about what the payment is even though a previous reply asked the same question. People seem to ask this question even though they aren’t even interested in the job offering.
- Lack of information in the OP. People seem to answer the questions in the template post but don’t answer them with nearly enough information(if any sages or moderators want to see example of this please DM on here).
What could be done to improve quality
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I am not sure if this is already a feature but it would be nice to have a category specific flag message sent to you when your posts has been moderated instead of a generic one. Use cases:
- In the case of the recruitment category you will be able to link category specific resources and templates to users in the system message. This should hopefully encourage better posting quality.
- People will have a better understanding of what to do to improve their posting quality in that specific category. More often that not people are posting these low-quality replies because they don’t know the expectations of the category.
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I think one of the reasons why people post low-quality posts in the recruitment category is because they are unaware of the expectations for the category. Currently all that is displayed when you click the “new topic” button, to enter the editing window, is the template that you should follow. This does help solve some problems but it doesn’t really help with encouraging people to post good quality posts because it doesn’t say anywhere about posting in good quality. I would like to see these two topics linked in the editing window when you first click the “new topic” button in the recruitment category: About the Recruitment category and PSA: Be professional and selective when replying!. Linking these two topics should help encourage better quality discussion.
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Devforum is barely usable for the new members, we can’t even reply in Discussion, the system doesn’t motivate you to post more, it does exactly the opposite - demotivate you (trust me, you don’t want to use post approval after 5+ approved topics, the feeling of having someone determining if your topic meets the standards for 6th or even 7th time really gets on your nerves). The only solution I can come up with is tightening the moderation, making recruitment member+ will just make devforum more pointless
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I can understand it being disheartening. I do get annoyed myself sometimes. But ultimately I think it will be better overall. If there’s a better solution please suggest it.
After reading and listening to this whole discussion, probably the best solution is to just have the post approval at least be more active around the #collaboration:recruitment category to make sure people are posting appropriate topics. That way we can still have new members be able to post here, but also know that they need to make this professional and appropriate, since the post approvals will be monitoring. If a person does end up making a mistake too, they can always unlist the topic and give them some feedback on how they can make the post better before listing it back to the public.
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Totally agree, it is very discouraging to see that the community (or admins) don’t want the new members participating in discussion.
Secondly, the standards to be a full member are set way to high. I have been active, making threads, and replying to people as well as receiving likes and still haven’t been promoted. The reason I mention this is because maybe if the admins lowered (a decently large amount) of the standards to be upranked then maybe we wouldn’t have the issue of post approval being flooded with post to go through. If the standards were lowered then I suppose it would be ok to make the new members go through post approval for recruitment.
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I wanna address this cause I see it popping up a lot: I do not feel the devforum is unusable for new members, or even that the current restrictions hinder our ability to participate. I can only base this off of my perspective and that of those I have spoken to about it, however, and understand that this does not represent the new member group as a whole. Nonetheless, I feel the restrictions currently in place are very, very lenient.
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Maybe, but it’s like that for a reason. New member is a trial rank, really.
I think it’s constructive to talk about how to improve the category rather than trying to link it to certain trust levels. Maybe New Members seem to disproportionally break guidelines over Members, but that’s just because there’s more New Members and they are newer to the forum, and typically younger. There’s a correlation but it’s not causation and some Members make trashy posts too.
I already mentioned that we are likely not going to be able to put post approval on more categories because of workload issues. Besides, the major goal of post approval is to make sure Platform Feedback is neat and orderly – other categories only to a smaller extent. Putting post approval on more categories is also not something we really want to do because we want to make the forum as permissive as possible without losing too much value in terms of discussion quality. (as someone mentioned before, it’s a fine balance)
Thanks for the feedback so far on how we could go about improving Collaboration category, please keep it coming!
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Alright, here we go.
- as I said earlier, community approval
- PSA in Recruitment with suggestions for ideal prices and percentages
- start removing topics that do not follow the template (they are generally the low-quality ones)
I don’t think adding post approval to the Recruitment category is very helpful either for us or you. We already experience massive backlogs with the categories that we do have watch over (which isn’t too many, we’re chiefly around Platform Feedback) and there’d be no reason for us to be impeding on managers trying to build teams.
Recruitment is a community effort and you can all do your part to help people improve rather than to hinder such as through suggestions like this. We have a PSA that no one ever actually reads and I know this for a fact based on what I see in the responses of such threads. Here:
If you see an unsatisfactory collaboration thread but it is something you’re interested in, feel free to send the thread creator a private message about their thread and give some constructive ways to improve their thread (they should preferably be objective or something that many people would agree with and not be representative of only your own opinion). You are also able to forward threads to Community Sages and Developer Engagement (especially the latter) if they don’t follow in the spirit of the category or seem insufficient for the category.
Just be sure not to minimod the category, that’s not acceptable forum behaviour. We have a dedicated, active and wonderful moderation team for handling situations here.
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The issue is the current system(us trying to inform others of the standards we expect of posts on the forums) isn’t working. I strongly feel we need to(if not add post approval) add a strict, informative, unavoidable tutorial for creating posts in all categories.