Hello, I’m curious to why so many categories are being disabled for members.
Like the bugs categories?
I can’t make a bug report here unlike I used to be able to.
I rarely ever even get to see bug topics because they’re usually closed to even viewing, so I cannot see any bugs or their status most of the time.
And platform feedback?
Why did member permissions get taken away on those?
I understand like why lounge (which I only learned that it existed recently) is not for members, but these other ones?
Why??
I’m starting to fear that categories like forum feedback, or bulletin board will be removed for members
(which both are extremely important, especially with bulletin board sense many people make guides, instructions, sources, etc. for models [ HD admin is a good example for this] or modules).
That in general, makes me fear that the DevForum would soon be unreliable, due to so many member restrictions, like one I just stated.
Also keep in mind that no one can currently become a regular, because PA is closed.
Platform feedback categories are restricted to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high, since engineers actively read pretty much all of those threads. Most devforum categories open to members suffer from a high volume of duplicates and low-quality threads and replies, and allowing that same issue to affect platform feedback categories would waste engineers’ time and discourage them from reading.
Obviously a person’s membership status is not necessarily indicative of their post quality, but it takes frequent high-quality posting to rank up to regular, and that helps a lot with ensuring posts in platform feedback are, for the most part, of reasonably consistent quality. Other solutions, such as manual post approval, have proven themselves to be unsustainable, with multi-week wait times and over a dozen contributors.
As a member, your best bet is to find a thread you agree with and give it a like. If it’s a bug report, you can reply to the thread with any additional information not present in the original report that may help with solving the issue.