Evening all recently I’ve noticed a very common situation on threads (especially in the #public:public-updates-announcements) and the bug reporting area is the amount of noise on some threads.
Noise
By noise I mean replies that don’t necessarily contribute much to that of the thread but show personal expression. As a prime recent example, I urge you to take a check on this thread and as it’s evidently clear it’s quite clustered with an extreme amount of noise consisting of replies such as;
epic update cool roblox very cool
Don’t get me wrong what an extraordinarily epic update but when I was reading through the thread when you see about 60% of the thread consists of this… it can be very difficult and frustrating to read the valuable contributions made to the thread. For example, questions asked regarding the update are quickly lost and staff replies to those questions or an further update on the thread.
Solution
I’d like to propose a notion of creating a new plugin that would highlight staff replies specifically on all threads regardless (as I know some staff sometimes do use a background highlighting feature built into Discourse) really making them stand out so it’s very easy to see them and if they are replying to any post in the thread it’s easy just to expand it from the staff members post.
Really minimise the noise on those threads - don’t get me wrong everyone is excited and happy for this update but we don’t need to tell the staff 60 times “that it’s very good or a very good addition to roblox” as this information can easily be summed up in a like. If there’s an reply that’s already said something similar support that reply, don’t make an exact clone of it. If somebody has already wrote 3-4 sentences saying “This update is epic, X,Y,Z” support it and keep our threads tidy and clean.
Don’t litter threads with replies under 10 words that aren’t questions where possible (specifically an message like “Thanks Roblox, very cool”) it’s not cool when the thread ends up with 40-60% of the thread being hidden because people have flagged your reply.
Totally agree on this one. I think that they closed the UGC announcement post cus of that. Happened to also accidentally join the “thanks Roblox, very cool” bandwagon and on a post with 60ish replies, there was little over half litter replies. This needs to be dealt with
I did not like the noise that appeared out of the forum’s thread. Clearly it is very “useless” to the thread and does not really extend the thread in the contextual way.
The new updates keep the community excited and obviously they become trigger-happy when they want to say something to the update. We sort of need to implement some way to get this chatter in a separate thread, or another feature might be possible to suppress the noise in the replies.
Also we might PSA to the people to use the like button instead of randomly throwing noise into it.
I completely agree as well. I used to stupidly do this a few times back when I was new to the forum, unaware it was regarded as spam. Nowadays the amount of users that spam or litter threads is an issue. Users should read the rules before posting as I’m sure they’re unaware (as I was) that they are actually breaking them.
Yeah, this really poses a dilemma. People post meaningless affirmative answers that let the engineers know the update was good, but they drown out meaningful questions and concerns. Simply leaving a like isn’t sufficient because people like posts by Roblox admins for no reason (as could be seen when Roblox announced that Discord links weren’t allowed).
My solution was that people post their approval but they add something meaningful to it. Ex:
Wrong: Nice update, thanks. 30char
Correct: Thanks for this update, I can’t wait to use it for/in ______. It helps me because ______. I can’t wait to see _____ improved. (or something similar).
Engineers at Roblox would benefit more from hearing the concerns, priorities, and well-written thoughts of developers than they would from getting an overall “thank you” for their update.
There’s a caveat to this actually. A lot of people will just fabricate a generic reply when they notice the char limit / someone tells them they should only post when it’s meaningful. So sure, we won’t get “Thanks for the update! 30 chars”, but we will get for example:
Thanks for this update, I can’t wait to use it in my current project. It helps me because it lets me do things I wasn’t able to do before, which is awesome. I can’t wait to see what Roblox improves next.
Which is equally meaningless, but it now actually takes more time to read and classify as spam, and also moderators have a harder time denying this. Ideally people should only post when their comment actually relates to the feature, not just to attempt to participate, and we shouldn’t suggest a template or give requirements for what should be in the post, because people will game the format to do whatever they want to do anyway.
I expected somebody to point this out - the friend I was talking to had the same response. I really think people should just like the post unless they are able to give genuine feedback.
Obviously, though, we can’t ever force people to do this, so I think this will always be somewhat of an issue.
I 100% agree on this. I am always seeing this issue on tons of topics, mainly in the feedback categories.
I think Roblox should implement a system where, whenever a user posts a reply, a message appears reminding them of this. Yes, everyone would stop reading it after a couple of times, but it would help remind users who are new to the forum. In addition, it could add onto harsher moderation, as users knew they were not following the guidelines and still broke them, or failed to read the message and posted a reply which the message stated not to.
I’ve seen many topics before touch on this topic, but there are always new members coming in and it is impossible to make them all follow this without harsher moderation (Maybe not a formal warning, but instead a mute from replying for a day or two.)
