Remind the author of the DOs & DON'Ts when starting a discussion

Forum Help Forum Features
#1

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to find worthy discussions to contribute to, because of all the out-of-scope topics that aren’t a discussion at all.

My experience gets disturbed by topics like:

  • Moderation inquiries for a single person (such as “is this allowed?” and “why am I banned for …?”)
  • Support inquiries (such as “How can I change the name of my group?”, “Question about voice chat”, “Is this happening to anyone else?” and “How do I become a Roblox QA tester?”)
  • Other inquiries for a specific person, and not an open discussion (such as “I am struggling to find any developers” and “I have a build that lags, how can I solve this lag?”
  • Bugs & feature requests (often also acknowledging they know they’re posting in the wrong category; topics such as “Mobile app lua compiler” & “Website player glitch”)

Those topics are just some in my flagging history, my side job became flagging discussions threads apparently…

I feel like those authors don’t want to intentionally break rules. They are just inexperienced with the DevForum’s rules and guidelines, and mistakes can always happen. Henceforth, a reminder of what is allowed & what is not allowed can avoid these out-of-scope threads.

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my experience using the forum because I can spend my time actually discussing instead of flagging. I like writing up flags, but I love discussing more.

A proposed solution is to add DOs & DON’Ts to the thread template. Include that bug & feature requests, moderation & support inquiries and other out-of-scope topics aren’t welcome at Development Discussion.

I don’t want to blame DET (DevEngagementTeam) in any way, they’ve responded to all my flags within 72 hours and they took action 99% of the time. This request will have positive impact on their efficiency, as contributors have to think twice before continuing, which might result in less posts requiring intervention.

13 Likes
#2

Just yesterday I had been thinking that when the Devforum reopens promotions from Member to Regular, there needs to be more scrutiny for the user to prove their practice of Devforum etiquette.

I especially think more needs to be done to encourage users to search topics before creating new ones.

Although some questions like “how much violence/gore is too much” are valid due to vague terminology, I often find that the OP’s answer is already clearly outlined in the Community Rules. Perhaps the “your topic is similar to…” window can provide a link to the Terms of Use and Community Rules when detecting these types of topics, but the user is still responsible for checking the rules before asking about them.

2 Likes