If it’s a small thing, then surely contacting a developer that you are already familiar with, or doing a quick look-around in #collaboration:portfolios using tags, will sort that out.
I fully agree that this will make things a lot more inconvenient and impersonal. I’m not a fan of the update myself, but the pros far out-way the cons.
The tags are useless cus half the time, people spam unrelated tags for better search results or the portfolios people make are just “showcases” of their work so they can open their commissions for 2 days.
Ok now imagine this. What if the people you’ve hired previously are either too busy or you just didn’t like their work? Twitter is plagued with bots and discord groups like HD are… yea…
Honestly the only pros I see is that the people who overspend their time on the DevForum don’t have to spend it on flagging posts in the collab category.
This update is everything!! Finally, now people can’t cry and argue about each other’s payment offer 
Only downside I see to it is that now you can’t make a reply to warn people about scammers. Yes, the flagging system exists, but it isn’t instantaneous. I’m sure people would love it if they could just see a comment that says “hey, this dude’s a scammer” rather than contacting the person and finding out the hard way.
Not to mention, many people use replies to review people and their work to see whether they have had issues with other developers/ clients in the past.
while I agree that baseless accusations and arguments can break out, and that they definitely don’t belong on the devfourms, I think people should still be able to leave 1 review, whether it be negative or positive just so that the community can get a better view on the person that they are hiring or doing commissions for.
Edit:
also, questions that one person might have for the recruiter that apply for everyone may be have to asked over and over again in dms, causing an inconvenience to the hirer.
eg: asking for backup payment, more info on the job etc…
I agree. There are a few people I know of that are running studios, scam, and like to then recruit more people. I think that this is also especially bad for the new people to recruitment. They look at a post, see it has guaranteed payment, and automatically apply. My first jobs were a lot of that.
Aside from scam warnings, there are still a few reasons for opening topics.
Allowing beforehand warning: A lot of people are concerned about internet security, as they should be, but they don’t want to accept random friend requests. They have them apply by replying to the post and giving their discord, to let them know that they friended them, not a rando, and they also give their portfolio. I find this a very efficient way, since you can also get a sense of their skill by doing this.
Asking for more info: Some posts are not written as detailed as others, yes, but replying allows to get more info. I see that the point of this is to get info via DM, but that means one person is getting the information. This also ties into preventing scams. If the person suspiciously dodges giving info, they are probably a scammer.
Conclusion
Personally, people flagging posts was fine. I think there are a number of advantages to keeping #collaboration the way it was. Of course, @DevEngagementTeam has the final say.
There are many ways to avoid being scammed, like doing background checks, talking with past contractors, asking to be paid in milestones.
Discourse has a DM feature so you can let them know through DMs that you friended them/want to friend them on Discord. So non-argument.
Again, my point here:
I’ve sent DMs instead of responding to #collaboration:recruitment posts, and I never get a response, except when I put, “Sent you a DM!”
Then that is fault of the OP for being unaware of the existence of DM’s /shrug
also
get discord man; really useful tool and some recruitment topics ive seen require the use of discord
This new change is kinda unnecessary since replies helped recruitment posts get attention and each reply bumped said post also.
Without replies, every recruitment post will get buried by others in a few hours and nobody will see them.
The recruitment category barley gets attention from anyone as it is since people gave up on it, it’ll be way harder for developers to hire people because of this.
Then you should support the feature request here to make it #bulletin-board esque: New Recruitment Update
Why the heck is happening.
I swear that Roblox is purposely trying to stop developers from earning money, this is happening to SFX Designers with the Tommy ad and extensions like Roundify and @Quenty’s part to terrain with their functions being added to Studio.
How is Roblox “trying to stop developers from earning money”? You can still DM the OP if you are interested.
It just feels like they are. I don’t like the idea of writing a DM just to apply for a job (which I’ll probably never get one).
Generally other methods of contact are provided if you are not comfortable with DM’s for whatever reason, such as Discord and Twitter. This flow is much better. When you apply for a job in real life do you do it publicly? no
What if you don’t use them for whatever reason?
Then resort to devforum dm’s, although there is no reason to not have at the very least discord
Maybe because there are bad people on the platform?
I’m friends with a developer on the DevForum who doesn’t have Discord.
I’m fine with part to terrain being adde to the Roblox terrain editor, but this is the classic issue with developing tools on a platform, and why making more plugins is a lower priority for me–if you do a good enough job, your feature gets added to the platform.
This honestly… isn’t really a bad update in my opinion. I’m just not used to not seeing any replies on a certain topic for recruitment topics as they always (most of the time) have at least a reply or two to see. I’m just not used to it lol. Especially seeing every recruitment topic getting locked.
I like this new change. Recruitment was a pretty chaotic when the replies were open sometimes,( accusations, mini-modding etc.) and this will prevent this from happening.
However it might be inefficient for towers, its good to let people see your portfolio, to let the know about important info, and contact, etc.
Overall, this change is not bad at all.