What if this ever came down to bug reports though? That is very crucial and if the forum is not correctly structured, then it can turn into a big mess. I believe there at least should be some things that need editing to keep things safe.
Withhold until the author creates a bug report following the conventions of the forum.
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This would not improve discoverability. Tags donāt really work that way.
I donāt think this has anything to do with privacy. Everything youāre posting is already public. How does privacy get at all involved here?
This is about improving utility and usability of the forum for everyone who uses it, not imposing any ideas. Furthermore, Roblox isnāt making these edits for the most-part, community members are.
Title is the first thing users see before entering a thread. Its sole purpose is to be informative and summarize the topic before anyone even reads it (sometimes titles we change in Post Approval are something like āStudio crash bugā, this is pointless to discuss with the user so we just change them and hope they learn from the edit).
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Listen, from my perspective search ability isnāt the reason to edit posts, itās a side benefit.
Rewriting what people have rewritten is okāeven encouragedā, as long as itās clear this action was taken by a moderator. The software supports this, including revision history, and notifying the user in question.
A good community require good curation, including moderation, editing titles, fixing grammars or links, or even editing links or adding notes.
I agree that the forum staff shouldnāt misrepresent these edits or changes as coming from the original author. A note at the bottom on what they changed will be sufficient to clarify what changes were made.
The devforum is more than just a place to voice your opinion. Itās an archive of information, and a resource to developers. To not curate the devforum would be doing a disservice to the whole community.
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That canāt always be a solution though, you need to understand that some things have to be taken care of quickly and just for the sake that we save time and not making a big mess on messaging everyone saying, āyour post needs to be written in a more professional way here, how about changing this to thatā
I am shocked you do not value our right to be represented exclusively by own our words.
Regardless, impositions on freedom of speech such as censorship, forced speech, or authored speech are morally reprehensible to the very core. They do not promote good discussion- in fact quite the opposite- and nobody contributes to these discussions for anyone to rephrase or rearrange their posts.
If you are fine with someone writing a post for you, give them permission, and there is no issue.
Itās true that it is a resource. It is also a hub for discussion.
Nobody wants the DevForum to be uncurated.
We want it to be curated while respecting the intent of the original authors.
This is not adequate support. These are only visible between the author and the moderator. Nowhere is it readily visible to anyone other than the author that the wording of a post was changed by a moderator.
The rest of the thread viewers are not made clearly aware that the original post was doctored, and are led to believe the OP is responsible for the words under their name.
The post should be denied and a message should be sent to the user to explain why their post was not relevant or conventional. This is already done en masse with Roblox asset moderation and the same system should apply here.
Roblox should consider a second title that can be added to a post eventually by moderators, but not changing what the owner wrote, that can be understood as communication limitation, so two titles will be displayed, and both will be included in a research, I mean if like I look for a topic, if I use the original title or the corrected one it will give same result.
I think a simple solution to this situation is just a disclaimer when you join the forum about what rights the forum āmoderatorsā I know thatās not the official term have over you and your posts.
I honestly donāt think itās that big a deal if it does not change the overarching meaning of your message, however agreeing to allowing your posts to be modified in this way gives you the option to other use the forum or not use the forum 
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If a user breaks forum convention, then the fate of the post is now in your ballpark, but nobody expects to come back to a post under their name that was not written by them.
The post should really just be taken down, or a suggestion should be sent to me to rephrase it. Then I can repost when I make a proper feature request. I do not want anyone changing the wording.
Someone elseās timeframe is not an excuse to manipulate my words in a way that I do not consent to. If it cannot be done in a way that respects the author, then it should not be done.
To be represented by my own words is not that big of an ask. In fact itās the essence of laissez-faire. It would actually be less work for the team to simply remove posts with titles/bodies that do not abide by convention, rather than taking the time to read and rephrase them.
I do not think we are being overly sensitive or unreasonable in the request to ensure that posts under our names should be phrased at our discretion.
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I disagree with the opinion that any editing is wrong. Good editing contributes to the health of discussion. This includes taking an active role in splitting conversations, and limiting topics, and editing posts to create clarity.
From a philosophical perspective I donāt believe that a healthy forum should be guided by ālaissez-faireāāa healthy forum of this nature requires curationāwhich includes editing. In any event, Roblox is absolutely not a laissez-faire platform. Iāll also note that freedom of speech is something you are not guaranteed on Robloxās website.
It is unfair to call editorial changes that are currently being made as āforced speechā or āauthored speechā, although staff is certainly censoring low-quality posts. I believe that staff are preserving author intent when editingāalthough this requires a certain level of trust. While bias is impossible to avoid as a human, I think that staff isnāt overtly biasing, or restricting discussion, but even then, those are things I would trade for quality discussion.
From my perspective, the real conflict here is that the Roblox forum staff may not clear in communicating edits, and this feeling that edits can result in misrepresentation. And maybe thereās also a certain level of trust missing too. The action I support is to clearly label when content has been edited in non-minor ways.
In short, I value discussion quality and a healthy forum community over the absolute guarantee that my post title, or content, would not be edited, authored, censored, or managed, to promote said discussion and community.
I trust the forum staff to respect my posts and words.
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To be clear, if I didnāt trust the forum staff, weād be having a whole different discussion. Iām most certainly biased in that I know several staff members personally.
I think one other takeaway is that the forum staff should work on ways to create trust and respect between users and staff.
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Whatās a worse user experience: your topic randomly vanishes with no explanation, or the title of your topic gets modified a bit to be clearer?
The answer is apparent. Itās a lot more work (by orders of magnitude) to send a message explaining why your topic was entirely unsuitable (the implication of it being completely disallowed) for the forum based on the title than it is for the Post Approval team and Sages to just make the titles more desirable.
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Editing someone elseās writing without a good way to show itās been edited would make me feel wrong as the editor, and wronged as the author.
You are right that good curation needs to happen, but above that, respect for author intent, and the process of editing a textual work thatās not displayed under your name should be mutually shared with the author.
Policy and structural changes can bring a solution.
If permission is requested before editing, there are individuals I would trust as well, but not without the initial approval.
I have had bad experiences with exactly this situation in the past, on these forums, so I canāt give blanket trust to unknown editors based on their forum badges.
It is worse user experience for my post to be amended without my consent and I would rather it be removed than filtered through someone elseās linguistic judgement.
When a moderator edits your post it becomes awkward if you want to undo those amendments. If they deny the post, however, everyoneās on the same page about what needs to happen to ensure it complies with the forum standards, and what can be done to bring it back.
If it truly is as you say, orders of magnitude more challenging to redact a post and send a note to the author than it is to edit the phrasing of a post, there are no shortage of solutions out there for creating automated / tick-the-box approaches to relaying that information.
"Your post was withdrawn for the following reasons:
- Non-specific title
- illegibility
- bad link / personal info
please correct these before resubmitting your topic"
This would go miles.
I can take accountability and say I was the one who edited your post title, and Iāll just address it directly rather than paraphrase in terms of the thread.
If you had an issue with the way I changed your title, you could have messaged me directly or contacted Developer Engagement and I would be more than happy to provide feedback on your title or help you develop better titles in the future. It was probably said multiple times here but the intent of correcting your post was to make it more clear as to what you were asking. The title in itself would warrant feedback.
It seems thereās a lot of fear about staff holding you accountable for changes that one of us may make to your thread. Thatās not the case. Staff have access to edit history and can see who made the change, so they would be held accountable for the edit rather than you. In addition, I think itās personally better to avoid moderation action. When we edit itās less likely youāll receive staff feedback which, may I remind, incrementally adds up to getting suspended. No one should be suspended for silly amendable mistakes.
Asking āHow do I make posts?ā in Scripting Support isnāt immediately clear about what youāre searching for and it disturbs discoverability especially if others are looking to accomplish the same kind of thing. Your original title made it seem like it was asking how to create posts on the DevForum. Absurd as it may be, we already have enough issues with bad posts and miscategorisation.
We have clear cut guidelines for changing post titles:
- They mustnāt contradict the original title of the thread (rephrase does not contradict)
- They must be for the sake of grammar edits or clarifying the intent of post (which is exactly what I had done for your thread as well as several others)
- They should generally be able to improve searching
We donāt just change titles on a whim, theyāre for good reason and I fail to understand why weāre not seeing the positives that it brings, only looking at the negative. Itās pointless complaining. I would be more than happy to receive feedback about my habits or ways to improve for the future and Iāll tell you that I have on several occasions.
One of the points you brought up is that edits of post titles are okay if weāre doing it for the sake of clarifying what the post is on. Thatās exactly what we do though. Not sure why this has made it on board as a point against editing when itās supportive of what we already do. The same goes with the rest of your examples - grammar fixes and irrelevant title corrections.
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My stance is a hard-line one, yet it must be when defending the notion that speech shouldnāt be authored without consent. It can mean only that. I do not support any unsolicited intervention.
You personally messaged me about a spelling error in one of my posts in #help-and-feedback:scripting-support. I was grateful that you did not make the edit yourself, so that I might make the amendment on my terms.
Many of us recognize the positive effort towards keeping the forum organized, but it should not trump personal liberty to choose the words that represent our ideas, and if those words violate guidelines, the post would be better off hidden, not amended by a third party.
I donāt think anyoneās afraid of that- we recognize that staff have access to the change logs and wonāt moderate people based on another staff memberās edit, but Roblox has had a history of retroactive moderation, and if thatās even a possibility going forward, changes need to be clearly indicated as not being of the original author.
If moderators/sages could append clarifying ācommentsā into posts, this would be far preferable to changing the original phrasing, and allow people to see both the original, and amended ideas.
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You are heavily over exaggerating this. This is not an authoritative government restricting what you can do in daily life, this is basic housekeeping of a private, professional community to make everyoneās experience better.
Iām (un)surprised youāre hinging onto āfirst amendment rightsā as an argument. Thatās not how the first amendment works. Roblox is not the government.
And hard-line policies are very difficult to implement and enforce when taking account community health.
Judging from the reactions of this topic ā community consensus (which is arguably most important) is clearly in favour of the current system.
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Itās not really fair of you to paint me as being extreme when I am simply raising moral points of relevance/importance.
When I said hard-line, I mean logical hard-line. It is a boolean, no tradeoffs.
Freedom of speech is a precious right, and you are unable to bully me out of supporting it. I also donāt see the constructiveness of ham-fistedly wielding the first amendment (nor have I done so in this discussion).
Itās noteworthy that many people are in support of my original post.
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But heās right, true or false, 0 or 1, yes or no ,0.5, nes, trulse donāt exist. So the point is: or you talk witouth getting modifications from other people or you donāt talk. I personally think this a right thing. EDIT: My grammar is boolean too, but itās false.
sorry I just had to
OP likes: 32 (although likes donāt necessarily mean agree)
Comparing the like counts of your posts vs others gives a good idea of consensus. If you really want, you can even post a poll asking for peopleās opinion on the matter.
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We on post approval hardly have any permissions on the forum. Even if I had the ability to edit your post, I probably wouldnāt. My only role is to facilitate the post approval procedure. Post editing is a courtesy extended to allow some of these petty edits over pushing the brunt to 4 Sages or the Developer Engagement Team with significantly more responsibilities to handle.
I donāt make changes when thereās room for doubt or I donāt want to assume someoneās stance about something. Only when I am either majorly or absolutely sure that what I intend to change is the exact same as what the author put, Iāll commit a change. Itās not particularly our intention to invade your privacy or anything of the sort so if you feel that way (or if it does happen) then I apologise on their behalf. Your best friend will be the Developer Engagement Team to rectify said issues.
We absolutely value personal liberty so most of the time we donāt actively make edits. That being said, do keep in mind that you are the original author of the post. Youāre capable of countermanding edits made by said volunteers* and I have had my changes countermanded or declined on various occasions before. Once that happens, we step back and let Developer Engagement handle it if needbe; we donāt touch your thread again.
Moderation on Roblox and the Developer Forum are handled by two different teams and should not be compared to each other. Arguably moderation on the DevForum is much more involved and direct than moderation on the main site. They donāt scale the same way or have the same large scope. Weāre very fair and relaxed on when actual moderation action is deployed, which you can get up to speed with via the rules thread.
I can understand wanting a way to indicate that someone has made a change to your post and someone mentioned earlier StackOverflowās way of representing secondhand edits by also tacking on an editorās name. This is also present on various forum software as a non-intrusive footnote. I canāt say anything in that regard but if thatād help, by all means.
In regards to the clarifying comments on posts, we try to do what we can. We feel that itās not worth bothering you over petty edits but send feedback over if weāve had to change a postās title for a significant reason (e.g. informing you to be more clear with titles when posting in the future). We Ā¶ arenāt able to use the edit summary tag to personally inform you of a change quickly because the option literally does not show, otherwise even petty edits would have edit notes. I can see that it may be a little upsetting if no one else knows that a change was made though. We canāt show edit history because that would be more invasive than whatās found to be invasive here.
Iām only really able to speak from my stance as a post approval member and no further. I donāt know if anything adequately changes your view here or if itās been informative, but Iām more than willing to work with DevForum members on any occasion or receive feedback if Iāve made a disagreeable choice.
* Iāve starred the word volunteers because this is a bit of a misconception floating around that I donāt think has been corrected yet. Remember that the only moderators on the DevForum are Developer Engagement. We ourselves arenāt moderators at all, especially not PA. Sages may have some moderation capabilities but they themselves arenāt moderators either. Where necessary, they contact Developer Engagement to have situations handled.
Apologies for massive text walls. I donāt split things up well.
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