Can’t you simply flag the replies as spam if they are adding nothing constructive to the topic, and given this is announcments almost any replies would be by definition spam and therefor are flagable.
Agreed.
What happens is that the original reply starts with “Thanks! Great update. This is useful to be because X.” Then when the other replies flow in, the first reply is edited with “also, I spot X” or “I wish we can do X.”
One of the detriments from this (other than those like farmers), is that the replies underneath can sound repetitive since the original already had edited the content in. Most users, especially skimmers or newcomers don’t notice the editing trickery happening and scoff at bottom replies thinking that they’re not adding anything new.
I remember when some update came out, I pointed out a problem, with my reply being 5th or something. Then, the first reply was edited to include something similar, but the intention was blatantly obvious. I politely DMmed the author to inform them, sure they removed that edit from that particular post, but continued to do so for future announcements.
The people who do this care more about getting likes than getting a DM from a staff member to have that feature added/bug fixed. The latter should be the ideal incentive for posting, but sadly the sheer attention to update topics indirectly foster this kind of behavior.
I honestly believe, that instead of adding minor measures to limit abusive behavior, the entire reply system of announcements should be scrapped. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t a survey system much better and more organized to look at for the Staff than just (possible trash) replies? Or, likes gotten in the update categories shouldn’t count towards the total likes in their profile (of course a Discourse feature).
Until then, I guess we just need to rely on DMs and flagging, which is not satisfactory but it’ll have to do.
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Not sniping, but posting for the sake of it with a generic reply instead of genuine feedback. I’ve done it a few times in the past and sometimes I feel it’s behaviour like that which has made announcements anti-feedback. And it’s also coming back to bite me hard.
When I look at announcements now, my primary reason for posting is because I have a question or issue of some kind that I feel I want to raise. It’s just that it’s so hard to make out any signal because of all the noise and I feel like this is also why staff don’t often reply to our feedback on the threads. Without a clear path to dialogue with legitimate feedback, it’s just a pain to scroll through.
I would love to dialogue with other more experienced members of the community or staff about updates or the feedback I’m giving so I can continue to learn and improve the way I think about these things and how I provide feedback. Knowing that I’ve posted generic trash on announcements in the past, expecting not to make out any signal for feedback I have and lack of staff replies has just led me to stop posting on announcements altogether (or at least significantly, may happen once in a blue moon).
Please add this. I don’t want to see that “thanks this is cool” nonsense on announcements. I want replies to only have actual feedback on them. There needs to be an equal effort to flag or remove these posts and not discourage flagging appraisals*.
* IIRC at one point staff did discourage flagging appraisal posts. I can’t remember which, but an announcement had a lot of its appraisals flagged which was good but the announcement kept getting locked as a result.
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I think this behavior should just be against the rules, be it through an explicit rule, or implicitly as part of another one. It not being forbidden seems to naturally lead users to being dishonest and greedy like this. You can pretend you’re being altruistic by using your post to raise feedback higher on the topic, but the reality remains that you’re just being rude to the people who posted in the first place, and likely misinterpreting, paraphrasing, or taking them out of context.
We should have a rule that explicitly states that editing your posts intentionally and persistently to encompass replies made by other users later in the thread is inappropriate.
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Another solution is to allow users to see edit history of a reply and when they edited it (if that’s possible). Users could then see which replies were made just to farm likes and flag them accordingly. People who give normal feedback don’t need to be held by the time limit the just to fix a typo.
At the moment it only looks like this is possible if post history is public. I don’t think showing edit history to the public is a good idea…sometimes people accidentally post sensitive information or inappropriate information, by opening edit history to the public, this would allow access to that. Even if it’s per category, there is always that chance that someone posts sensitive information and quickly needs to edit it out.
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I feel like this should be added, lately, the latest #updates:announcements from today and earlier this week have had a lot of edits from first or second replies which floods the post entirely, having an edit or simply extending the # of time to reply so this doesn’t happen in the future, it’s honestly annoying.
I’ve also known that you can bypass replying to announcements in a certain way, which seems like it should be patched or noted from staff that runs the forums.
I don’t want useless text and the same text saying “WHOA THIS IS COOL” and more, I want to see honest and valuable questions from members across the forum and responses from staff that I might have struggled with and not flooded replies that are baseless. 
Posting for likes on the forum, not about likes, contributing, and being here for help and asking questions is what I think is priority for people that are here, it needs to stop.
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In thought it sounds like a good idea, but it can be bad for developers wanting to give real feedback. Possibly only regulars could post replies, or some requirement to be able to reply?
This is addressed. Making it regular-only will only cause a million topics of complaints. Roblox already collects thoughts through surveys using #roblox-surveys – I see no reason for them to not be able to do similar in #updates:announcements.
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I agree, but some devs like to have discussion about it in the replies. Maybe just have it as a rule and count those sorts of spam comments as spam, which will hopefully prevent users from doing it.
Anything that isn’t spam is just questions or showing disagreement which only Roblox staff would be able to answer and take action on. I don’t think those need much discussion – the former is just a question, and the latter is an opinion.
It seems like a good solution was reached on this announcement:
Rather than auto-unlocking after 10-15 minutes on a timer, the OP manually locked and unlocked it after about an hour. This prevented people from waiting for the timer to count down so they could spam replies, and gave people who have contributive comments a fair chance to reply when it was opened up a while later.
A more direct solution could be to develop a plugin that limits the number of times a person can post in the first X replies for an announcement, but would probably take too much work to be worthwhile.
Sorry I’m late with the bump, I only remembered this thread recently.
That topic was just technical by nature, the users that might post just for the sake of posting this may not necessarily be very technical people. Closing it for an hour is just going to delay the inevitable.
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If closing it for an hour is too short, then what about for 24-48 hours after posting? It will open sometime the next day, but no one will know when (aside from the OP). This makes it so that only those who happen to be reading the topic when it opens will get the first chance to reply. Any pressing issues or concerns can be messaged to the OP while the topic is closed. No matter how engaged these users are with growing forum stats, spending 24 hours refreshing an announcement page waiting for it to open is significantly more work than watching a timer count down from 10 minutes.
I have seen this happen several times, especially in #development-discussion.
It is pretty cool to get a couple of likes on a post, but the main purpose of the DevForum is for game development. There are many other websites that are forum-based so if you want to talk about things not related to game development, then go over to one of those websites instead of spamming nonsense here on the DevForums.
For example, #development-discussion is supposed to be about the development of games, and I have seen several topics that discuss current issues on Roblox and misuse the category.
I have also seen way too many topics in #help-and-feedback:scripting-support that are “how do I learn scripting?” and are just designed for people to maximize their stats.
I do think a post cooldown in #updates:announcements will be a good idea, because it will minimize spam and users will not be able to edit their posts for a while.
With the announcement yesterday, there was a slow mode put on the topic, which apparently prevented people from editing their post. I don’t know 100% how slow mode works on Discourse, but I am assuming it works like Discord where individual users are rate-limited, and isn’t a global limit. But it could be the latter as individuals spamming on an announcement usually isn’t a problem, however I can’t confirm since I’ve never replied to a topic with a slow mode. Maybe they can put that, that way the topic doesn’t just explode with 10+ replies of trying to get it to be the first, and you can wait to finish reading one, then another, and so on
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I still see certain people rushing to use a feature for the first time to pretend they are a domain expert and then posting some platonic feedback just to get the first post (every time). Not actually convinced just limiting edits is the right solution here anymore.
Ideally I suppose they should just kick these people from the forum or ban them for a long time to disincentivize the behavior. Kinda sucks that their behavior has been entertained for so long.
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Decided this is not worth my energy