Quick note that is not a suggestion to allow a single person to flag a post multiplie times since i’m pretty sure this was suggested before sometime. I’ve noticed a recent issue where you cannot report rule breaking posts anymore. When trying to report a post it often says:
My guess is because the specific moderator flagged it as not being reportable again. However, this does alot of issues. Often we all make mistakes but this error has caused situations where spam and advertisments topics stayed up for days because it wasn’t reportable. My suggestion would to not allow this function for normal posts excluding posts made by Roblox Staff or if the post is above 1 year old (Since reporting old posts isn’t allowed either way)
Due to privacy reasons i won’t show the posts in question but this is a concern that has became a issue multiplie times across the forums
Hey, we noted a one-off problem due to how certain posts are flagged. I’m asking moderators to re-review those posts and this issue should hopefully not occur again (to this magnitude) going forward. Thanks for posting this which made us investigate and find the one-off issue. You should see a majority of the posts you’re likely referring to be addressed over the next few hours.
In terms of the general request, we’d prefer if users do not re-flag content which has already been reviewed by moderators. If the post is edited later, you can flag it again then once the content has changed. No plans to change this.
If a post that is breaking rules shows this, use the “Something Else” flag and explicitly state what rules are being broken.
Sometimes it shows this because a rule breaking post was edited, but not actually changed (editing “removes”/hides flags to evade moderation), and sometimes it shows this because a couple moderators are legitimately this incompetent (thankfully happening less these days)
The manual “Something Else” field requires a moderator to at least respond to your flag, which means it’s got a far better chance of actually being handled
You mean more? I keep seeing more and more cases of moderators not taking any action to bug report posts or feature request posts that have been reported that violate or not follow the required terms or procedures only for some other moderator to later close the post and sometimes unlist it too. I also keep seeing posts and replies with inappropriate or derogatory words still stay up after being reported. And don’t you dare at all to ping or reply to engineers about bug reports that have been forgotten by the engineers, because you’ll almost always get your reply removed.
Imagine spending all the time and effort reporting bugs only to be ignored or get your post or replies removed for stupid reasons. Hey, we aren’t getting paid for this, we’re doing this for free so you can improve your platform. If you guys cared enough about stuff, you would hire and form specialized QA teams, but you aren’t, so don’t treat us this badly when we volunteer to do this for free.
Generally speaking, we’d prefer to wait until engineers (rather than our forum moderation team) have had a look to determine if a post has sufficient info or is duplicating another topic, exactly because of the reason you describe: we don’t want to discourage people from reporting issues by getting hit with takedowns/closures for things that might be okay for us.
Also, it might be best if we start a new topic for your concerns or append somewhere else, as this topic is about the issue of not being able to re-flag certain posts.
For example, bug reports made by folks that run Roblox on Linux through Sober or Vinegar and experience certain issues that they expect Roblox to fix. Like this one bug report:-
So I flagged it to moderation for not being related to Roblox.
[Moderator 1]: Moderator 1 posted this reply and then never took any action regarding the bug report:-
So, why did it took 3 moderators to address one report? It’s obvious that it’s not a Roblox issue so why didn’t the first moderator close the report already, and why did the second one close it for an unrelated reason?
Most bug reports that get closed for being duplicates are when another fellow user post a reply that it’s a duplicate with the link of the original report and maybe report it for a moderator to close it, not when engineers decide that. By the time engineers take a look at the duplicate report, the bug would’ve already been fixed and addressed in the original one..
Too hard to decide if a bug report is Roblox related or not, but too easy to take the decision to remove my reply because for some reason, the engineer have been looking at a bug since October 2021 and never replied back or released a fix to it.
What additional information am I supposed to include? Is this a joke? I literally included detailed information about how the bug reproduces differently on the Mobile app and website and videos related to the bug.
Of course you made the ability to appeal moderation decisions taken here in the DevForum through Roblox Support that’s clearly automated, because you don’t care about mistakes done by moderators and don’t plan to change any moderation decisions.
Peak DevForum moderation right there.
That’s all I have got to say and I don’t plan on creating a new topic for this mostly because it’s a waste of time.
In general, our forum moderators (the ones addressing your flags) do not make the technical decisions about bug reports and feature requests unless it’s very obvious (e.g. very obvious duplicate or non-contributive bump). That’s why sometimes they leave it to engineers and product managers (like music_man).
A “bump, this is still happening” is generally not useful to us because it doesn’t explain why we should start looking into the backlogged bug. It always helps to explain how this impacts you, e.g. is this just a minor annoyance to you, or is this something critical stopping you from shipping a particular feature in your game, etc.
It’s not reasonable for an engineer to be looking at a bug since October 2021 and not give any updates or have the bug fixed. Also, no, it’s not just a “bump, this is still happening”, I included videos and explanation of how the bug appears differently in different platforms. Well, the bug isn’t that critical, however, it’s a huge inconvenience for Mobile players seriously using the marketplace. I doubt that stating that the bug is critical or major will help here, since I’ve tried it before for actual critical or major bugs that are still left un-looked at and unfixed. I really highly doubt that stating the severity of bugs will prevent my replies from getting removed.
Eitherways, this is the only way possible to give attention to a bug report that’s been forgotten and neglected. Even if it’s minor, why would it be left unfixed for almost 4 years? Don’t blame me, blame your engineers.
We have limited bandwidth and while it would be nice, it’s not our goal to address 100% of all bug reports within X time. We sort them by impact and then try to address them in that order (but there are many factors that go into determining priority, such as effort it takes to resolve or whether someone already happens to be actively working around that code). The best way to get something worked on is to keep adding impact to it by leaving Likes and informative responses about how it affects your work.
If you want to DM me about replies you think shouldn’t have been removed but have been, happy to take a look.
What you stated about how bug reports get prioritized is fully understandable, however, even if we take all of the factors into our hands, I still don’t get why would a bug be left unfixed for almost 4 years. The fact that an engineer posted a reply which stated that the bug report is being looked into makes it even more confusing. Most people would imply that if an engineer looked into a bug report, it would most likely mean that a fix is near to be released or is in the working.
I understand that the bandwidth of engineering teams are limited, however, are you telling me that not a single engineer that works in that particular feature or the one that replied specifically have time to fix a bug within a span of around 4 years? I would expect bug to be left out unfixed maximum for around 2 years, more is entirely ridiculous and just implies neglectance.
Leaving a like is easy, but the moment you reply to an old neglected bug report, a moderator will take down your comment even if it’s informative. Like it’s a bug relating to the group store in Mobile not showing all purchasable items, do I need to really leave an essay that probably wouldn’t be read anyways about how the bug has left me depressed for 4 years because I couldn’t buy my favorite hat from the store of a group on Mobile due to the bug?
I don’t mind engineers taking the their time to address bugs per their priorities, albeit not leave them unfixed for almost 4 years. Sometimes it’s just engineers forgetting about bugs, so a bump with a reply or mention to them is required though.
Now, this is just an example, there are cases that engineers promised to release fixes to bugs “very soon” according to them several months ago while not doing at all.
I just don’t want my replies to be removed when I remind engineers about bugs that they could forget about, is that too much to ask for? I don’t want to write an entire essay in a reply for that purpose.
At the end of the day it’s voluntary work and just neglecting bugs like this contradicts how Roblox always encourages developers to keep the bug reports going. Also, in every roadmap update, the original posters state figures like “we’ve closed 11K bug reports”, seems like highlighly inflated numbers to me.
Any chance you can send me some specific examples (in DM) of where you think it went wrong in the past on this so I can review and raise with the moderators if needed?
Both in terms of bumps being removed where you think that got in the way of things, and also where an engineer responded they’re working on it but didn’t resolve it, I’m interested in both.
