Remove New Members' ability to reply in bug reports

Forum Help Forum Features
#1

In bug reports, especially critical bug reports, the vast majority of lowball and spammy replies come from new members. This is bad and follows the reason of why platform feedback requires you go through post approval: engineers look at these topics and shouldn’t have to waste an hour scrolling through a post mostly full of can confirm (which doesn’t really help engineers in cases of critical bug reports).

Here are a few examples I gathered from looking at some of the top topics in bug reports:
although thankfully, as some of these were when the new member process were in it’s earlier stages, there aren’t as many lowball replies- or they have been removed

I don’t really feel the need to say any more with these examples.

What about other bug reports?
One word: Post Approval
iirc new members can use post approval to make contributions on feature requests, why not do the same with bug reports?

This would help drown out noise in critical reports while still allowing new members to help, but also making sure that engineers find the DevForums useful.

10 Likes
Critical bug report replies are hard to follow
#2

I don’t think restricting New Members from replying to bug reports is the right thing to do.

All of your examples are labelled as ROBLOXCRITICAL. Normally, when a platform-wide issue occurs, a large number of users who otherwise don’t care about the forum want to make sure they’re heard and that Roblox knows something is wrong, so they flock to these threads and reply without thinking. These big issues are usually pretty short-lived, so it’s fairly simple to deal with any noncontributive posting that happens on these threads.

In contrast, large problems like this don’t happen on normal bug reports, so making it harder for users to add extra information to non-critical bug reports seems extremely counterproductive. Any bad posting that does happen we can simply clean up and provide feedback on, since it doesn’t happen terribly often.

Perhaps we can take another look at this, though.

20 Likes
#3

Then maybe New Members shouldn’t be able to reply to critical bug reports? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

#4

As a New Member myself, I must say that I am also guilty of taking part in the whole “can confirm” messages, however I feel like the proposed solution to this would create tremendous stress on the Post Approval team.

I am by no means anyhow qualified to speak for the members of the Post Approval team, but I feel like if another scenario like today would happen with your proposed solution, I can only imagine the Post Approval getting flooded with over 20 approval requests on a single thread in a matter of minutes. This would also cause major backlog for the Post Approval members, resulting in more time being taken to try and go through each request.

I’m not sure if this is made clear anywhere or not, but I feel like there should be more notice to New Members about the Can Confirm messages, maybe a text detection that will put up a warning whenever someone tries to post a Can Confirm message without any further information that may help the Roblox engineers with solving the issue.

5 Likes
#5

As seen from the most recent post regarding the filtering system, there was quite a large influx of posts on the lines of confirmation of the bug. I too can admit to doing this. It is, with reasonable evidence, plausible to change the posting abilities of New Members on bug reports, but if it would be efficient is another question that would have to be considered.

Post approval, as mentioned, would be overwhelmed with requests, and by the time the bug is found by engineers, the post will be locked and replies would no longer be useful to the post. So, if this was to be implemented, New Members shouldn’t be given the ability to post period. This seems a little extreme seeing that the confirmation of bugs, especially those labeled “ROBLOXCRITICAL,” are something all members want to jump on and conform, deny, or contribute on.

That said, New Members are most likely learning the ropes of the forum and after the first experience of being told not to post conformation posts unless they contribute more information to the situation is enough to stop them from doing it again. I cannot speak for every New Member, but I myself like to contribute when I can to posts, and learning when it’s appropriate to and what content is allowed on posts is just part of being a New Member.

2 Likes
#6

Hello, “New member” Here I joined Dev forums in 2018 and am now just getting into it I must say I can agree with the whole

As @NicholasY4815 Said Post Approval is going to be flooded.

When people post in bug reports they want to let roblox know HEY THERE’S A BUG THAT I FOUND!! You know? People just want to feel like there helping in some way because, people on Roblox loves to play Roblox smoothly and when someone finds a bug or someone else finds a bug they want to point it out and or help with that bug or give there input about things as I am now.

Thanks for reading, have a great day. :sunglasses:

3 Likes
Post-Approval for Recruitment Topics
#7

What people want to feel is inconsequential. They are either helping a bug be solved or are making it harder to find the former. If they are unable to prevent themselves from contributing to the latter, then they should refrain from posting at all until they are able to contribute constructively.

7 Likes
#8

As much as we’d all like for this to happen, it’s unlikely. I personally think restricting new members in bug reports would be extremely beneficial, as compared to the current system of:

  • Bug report posted
  • Spammed with “its happening for me too”
  • Post locked

A secondary option would be allowing sages/CPA/whoever just instantly flag & hide nonconstructive posts on these threads.

People might have important or relevant information to share, such as steps to reproduce the bug, so locking the thread can be detrimental.

So like the post. It gives you the satisfaction of leaving input on the thread with 100% less clutter, guaranteed or your money back!

1 Like
#9

I too, am a new member. I don’t think excluding us is going to help. I’ve feel, well, discriminated. You don’t have to reply to everything and I don’t. The Dev forum already doesn’t allow most of its members to reply, so I think we’re good. If something was to happen then it’d be a zero strike warning.

2 Likes
#10

I’m a new member, and i always try to be someone honest and never lie.

My suggestion: Make another forum: Public bug reports and the normal bug reports.

PUBLIC BUG REPORTS:
Every new member can post in there until a mod selects you to post in bug reports, but they can’t post on BUG REPORTS .

BUG REPORTS:
Some mods will be able to select a player to post in the BUG REPORTS forum with the other people who takes this forum more seriously, leaving other new members who as said Elliott, they just do:

They will post on PUBLIC BUG REPORTS.

I hope moderators/admins or anybody else who can fix something look this. Thanks for reading

#11

Maybe instead of just restricting new members ability to reply in bug reports, increase the character limit for bug reports (maybe to around 100) This would hopefully keep people from just stating can confirm unless they have something to actually contribute

5 Likes
#12

I think it’s been proven that character limits have very little effect other than lowering the quality of the reply.
30chars

Additionally, even if that wasn’t an issue, it’s not hard to extend a meaningless reply to 100 characters:

4 Likes
Increase the character limit for thread bodies
#13

Instead of all-or-nothing, there’s smarter things we can do to reduce noise on high-traffic topics.

For example, we’re trying out a thing here where TL2+ has the permissions to reply to top-level (uncategorized) platform feedback topics, and I moved this one there:
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/robloxcritical-promptproductpurchase-performpurchase-critically-failing/401138

I think doing this is much less invasive on normal forum usage than fully restricting TL1 from replying to all bug reports. We just need to watch out with the robloxcritical ones and other high-traffic ones.

6 Likes
#14

I don’t agree with this. We should be able to post in bug reports, from me a New Member.

Ok let’s get serious now,

Why do I not agree?

  1. Some other people may not know the bug.

  2. Roblox should be accepting all bug reports, and delete spammy ones.

  3. Is it really that hard to just accept it? No, just go with it.

  4. Bugs are serious, not silly. I can guarantee you 99% are real, serious ones.

  5. Cricital Bugs are even more serious, so I can guarantee you 99.9% of those are real, super serious.

  6. This post won’t help the community at all, please stop. (Not saying I’m a mod.)

This won’t keep people from making useless topics, they can still spam topic till they reach 100 or over, maybe 250 - 500? That is much bigger, and copy pasting a fake bug won’t work either because that takes a long time to actually write it, so they likely give up.

1 Like
#17

Why is confirming a bug report deemed a bad thing? It’s an easy way for newer members of the community to get their voices out there and also lets others know that the bug is not a hoax/faux call.

1 Like
#18

If you have no new information to add, and you do not provide additional use cases for why the bug is important for you to have fixed, you should put a Like on the post rather than replying, to keep the bug report concise. Otherwise it makes things harder to get through for Roblox engineers and developers who have a stake in the bug being fixed.

1 Like
#19

This isn’t a bug report, it’s a discussion, I’m pretty sure that as long as I’m staying on topic, I’m following the regime of a discussion.

#20

Yes… I was responding to the question you put in your previous post. :stuck_out_tongue:

4 Likes
#21

Oh, right, I thought I was being reprimanded. Sorry, that’s completely my fault. However, is there not something else the forum could put in place in order to let New Members contribute to something? Maybe not just bug reports but something like for all reports, i.e: bug reports - vouch button to let Roblox know how widespread the issue is, studio features - vouch button to let Roblox know what features are wanted the most etc.

#22

We have Likes as a rough statistic for that. Liking = agreeing to or respecting a post. Is there a reason why you would want another button over the Like button?

1 Like