Punish users who respond to trolls

Threads are usually deleted a few hours after the first post is moderated, so this ‘attention’ is removed after a few hours anyway (which is shorter than the length of time it would take to moderate every user who replied)

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Never seen trolls there, you must be joking

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Even though I think this is a bit harsh, it is a welcome change, it will stop encouraging us to reply to these posts, just because other people are.

I believe we should be focusing more on getting the creators of these posts banned though

Trolls are fed through attention. Once they realize people care and are annoyed by them, they will grab onto that and repeat the same thing over and over again, hoping for more attention.

It’s not really the “publicity” that matters, but rather how much engagement and interaction they get. I can attest to this as someone that has ran several communities for over three years.

People that don’t realize when an extremely obvious bad faith actor is purposely causing trouble really shouldn’t be here, as much i dislike saying that. We need a basic level of maturity.

The problem is also exacerbated by the big amount of “minimodding” in the forum.

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It’s during these times that entire groups of people descend to do nothing else but reply. It makes the problem worse and allows for many opportunities for people to save and repost on social media for attention.

These continuous replies from people makes the problem worse by giving the idea that you can rock up, cause a riot and laugh at all the people trying to make the problem worse by replying. Sometimes moderation is not that quick and it reduces the impact of these decisions.

Developers need to be developing.


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Moderating all posts that reply would take even longer so that attention will exist either way, the only way to avoid this situation would be to have pre-approval for every DevForum post and that will not happen.

That’s against forum rules, if you really want to, you already have a reason to report those posts.

I however do not feel like a rule will help fix this problem, these posts are designed for people to make rash uniformed replies, which does not include reading the rules and making sure your post fits the rules.

While I do see this as a good change, I sadly do not think it would help much due to the design of troll posts.

This is correct, but sadly, rarely enforced, especially in a topic made by a troll. Devrel often just ignores people replying and expanding the chaos created by the troll. They’re usually repeat offenders.

You could say this topic is also complaining about that inaction.

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If users are going to be repeatedly ignoring the rules, they should feel the punishment for doing so. It might be intentional to make people reply as they do but it’s important to understand that these actions to not contribute and aren’t okay.

If people are so incapable that after multiple warnings, that they continue breaking the rules, they should absolutely be striked or even permanently banned.

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I do agree that trollers feed on attention from others and that replying to troll posts is not a good idea, but I just think implementing any punishment other than a warning for people who reply is going to have false positives and cause harm to the forum. There are just so many cases where it might not be clear or their are other variables. I think a warning/informational message explaining the problem with replying to trolls is a great idea/ compromise to this feature request.

Maybe locking flagged topics until they are reviewed is another fix?

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For what it’s worth, that specific quote is about people making the troll posts, not the reply.


If it is not obvious, this request does not cover it. You need to give more than just read this announcement to make change.

There is time between an auto-lock (assuming enough people flag it enough to activate) and the original incident, leaving time for people to reply to cause a scene. Maybe flagged as a community is enough to lock, that is always a discussion and is something to discuss.

Overall I want people to think before they act, more often people feel like they can reply and it won’t come back to them. I’d like to change that. Why should you be free to encourage harmful behaviour on the forums? Because you’re unable to make a simple decision not to reply. It’s not helpful and it needs DevRel to help cut it out by making it clear it’s not okay, how they do so and how harshly is their choice.

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I agree. When users reply to their topics, they give the troll exactly what they want, despite the good intentions that most of the users have to stop the troll.

It seems that people just can’t stop themselves from replying.

I am unfortunately no exception.

I have to work on this as well.

I hope this gets implemented :slightly_smiling_face:

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I just thought of a solution in case punishing users for replying is too “harsh” for some people:

When the topic reaches a state where it has been flagged enough times to be “flagged by the community”, I think it would be MORE than fair to auto-lock the topic until DET reviews the flag.

This prevents any further replies, until DET reviews the flag and takes it down.

If there are any flaws to my suggestion, please tell me :slightly_smiling_face:

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That is pretty much what happens just don’t think that staff have been gone for long enough each time for it to kick in.

The topic doesn’t auto-lock. It just hides the text of the post, with an option to unhide it.

Locking it would be better in my opinion.

There are alot of times where DET isn’t online to take the post(s) down, so locking them when they’re “flagged by the community” seens fair.

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I feel like this is more targeted to some users in specific

Only troll posts should be punished, the people responding didn’t have anything to do with the troll post ot begin with

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I saw exploiting troll auto-reporting others via other user’s video.

You’re welcome to review all previous replies where I mention:

A) Trolling is strikable
B) Replying increases the problem by giving attention.

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Sadly here’s the point.
If DevForum was over strict, not much people would even come.
It’ll die, then what’s next?
No trolls ever actually impacted my development and im not too sure how, unless you’re super sensitive

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Whenever I come across a “troll” post in #development-discussion, I write a message with some sort of ROBLOX Studio tip.

That’s one of the uses of the Dev Forum, right?

I think something that can help to prevent these types of incidents is to have more staff members awake at specific times.

People tend to make random topics around 9:00 PM (CST) up until sometime in the morning. We would be seeing less of these kinds of posts if there was more “security”.

I think we’re all equally at fault, but that’s just my opinion.

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The thing is this is Roblox and ppl are going to complain abouit how the moderation is soooo strict and awful and they cant continue to use this

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