Similarly to Quenty’s petition for < 15 character title bypasses to be moderated, I’d like to ask that posts resulting from not reading a thread are actively moderated as well. I understand that it’s one thing if there are 200 posts on a thread and someone misses something there – that’s fine and asking someone to read through 200 posts is not reasonable. However, if the thread is short enough, there’s no reason someone can’t spend a couple minutes reading through the thread to see if answers to their questions have already been posted or if someone has already posted what they were going to (no need for duplicate posts). Duplicate posts only bloat the thread, making it harder for other people to look through actual content and resulting in the thread’s same arguments to pop up over and over again. This is especially visible on the latest Avatar thread.
I’d also like to ask that this applies to topics themselves as well – a few people have been habitually posting duplicate topics because they couldn’t be bothered to use the search first, when they should have instead added onto the existing thread.
You are trying to program the behavior of an user. It is one thing that we have the rules in place to keep us on-topic and respectful towards each other, but the fact that we should follow rules regarding or we wanna read the entire thread or don’t post a second topic about something is a rule that you simply can’t enforce. Why not ? Since the only thing that you can do is locking threads. This will result to frustration by our end-user and only service a small amount of users that are actually bothered by the current situation.
Tl;dr;. A classic example of when it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.
What I guess should happen is that the post creator should take those answers and edit them back into the original post. That’ll help stop people from asking same questions, but then again like Velibor said, its changing the behavior of the user.
An important thing to consider when making rules is what impact the rule will have on the community. Sure it would improve the quality of the discussion, but I’m concerned that such heavy moderation would make people afraid to post. What’s the point of quality if your community is nonexistant?
It’s not easy to strike a good balance between the two extremes. Community management is a tough job. I agree that something should be done about the rampant post-then-read behavior, but I don’t think moderation is the answer. Maybe something more on the side of positive reinforcement is what we need, but I don’t know what that would be.
4 minutes is not a lot of time. If someone can’t be bothered to expend that much effort, then chances are their posts are going to reflect their lack of effort. And if you click “Summarize this topic”, it’s only 11 posts, with the important post by CodeWriter still showing.
On desktop I finished reading the first 54 posts entirely a couple seconds short of 4 minutes, and I made sure not to skim / speed-read either. If you’re skimming it’d be even faster. I got about 5 and a half minutes on mobile, and never had any issues with posts not loading.
I can’t speak for the ROBLOX staff, but as a Leader, I can’t see reports. I only moderate what catches my eye or is brought to my attention. I’ll gladly moderate duplicate posts, but I haven’t really seen any of them - certainly not enough to make it an issue. If you could provide examples or start PMing me with links when it happens, I’ll gladly take care of it.
I also don’t think punishments are necessary or a good idea for something as trivial as “I had a bad connection and it posted twice because I mashed the reply button in frustration.” (not sure if that actually happens, sounds pretty feasible though, and I can’t think of any other reason a person would reply with the same thing twice)
Not duplicate posts as in double posting, but the kind that aren’t allowed on Stack Exchange. When someone posts one thing on a topic and then another user posts almost exactly the same thing. For instance, one person could post “There’s a bug with the new characters where the upper torso randomly falls off” (not actually an issue – made up for the sake of discussion), and then someone a couple posts later says “The top part of my torso sometimes falls off!” The latter post is unnecessary (the exact same thing was posted before) and only bloats the thread (it’d be one thing if they were adding new information, but in this case, they’re not). If that happens repeatedly on a thread, it can bloat the topic from otherwise 25 posts to 50, make it harder for people to read through. This can also happen with threads where a topic for something already exists but someone posts a new one anyway because they didn’t bother to search for an existing one first. The “add to profile” issue threads are easily the first things that come to mind regarding this.
Posting about issues already addressed also fall under the umbrella of duplicate posting, or at least in the way I’m referring to it. If a staff member posts a list of known issues (e.g. “animations are temporary”, etc), you might have 10 people who afterwards post “omg animations are bad!”, which is significantly unhealthy for the thread. Actual replies are hidden by essentially spam that was already addressed in the list of known issues, and when someone posts something already mentioned in “known issues”, another person might post “Hey you don’t need to worry about x – it’s already listed under known issues”, and then, given that this is the internet, the person who didn’t read the “known issues” tries to defend themselves “oh I didn’t do anything wrong!” or “sorry bad joke!”, bloating the thread even more. You get 2-3 posts per time someone replies regarding something already mentioned on the “known issues” list.
Okay, yeah, I definitely agree. I see a lot of threads about the same thing.
I just now learned how to merge threads (didn’t think I was able to before), so I can start cleaning those up if I see them. If I don’t think the threads should be merged, I’ll just close the later one instead and post the link to the earlier one.
I would like to restart this conversation - there have been literally 10s of posts in #development-discussion that are “What are your coolest creations?” completely ignoring:
If not moderation, something automatic needs to be done more than “Your topic is similar to” on the back.
For the most part, they are a lot more active now, unlike they were 5 years ago when this post was made. But they can’t do everything instant. Give them time.
I understand that it’s a lot different now, but I’ve seen Roblox staff close down a lot of posts recently as they’re duplicates. Just trying to resurface a debate to see if something can be improved
Oh yeah, it definitely can be improved. They sometimes take down the wrong posts, and for my friend he put “Closed” in his portfolio and they unlisted and closed the thread. For duplications, they could make a better “Similar to this Topic” search that finds stuff by the words and replies in the post, instead of just the title.
yeah, it definitely can be improved. They sometimes take down the wrong posts, and for my friend he put “Closed” in his portfolio and they unlisted and closed the thread. For duplications, they could make a better “Similar to this Topic” search that finds stuff by the words and replies in the post, instead of just the title.