UrsitMcSparks hinted that the Dev Forums might be getting an overhaul sometime in the future.
The purpose of this thread is to post ideas for what you’d like to see as a feature of the Dev Forums, and to discuss/refine those ideas with your fellow devs.
Here’s a few “starter” ideas to spark discussion:
-Implementation of a private messaging system
-“ROBLOX Username:” slot in posted by user info
-Clearer distinction of subforums
Go. Post away. There are no bad ideas!
This is a way for us to let the Admin Council know what we’d like to see.
Ability for OP to lock own thread(i.e. confidential posts / derailed threads)
I have no problem with the lounge, but I assume some people would like it if you could hide lounge posts from recent discussion – some people just don’t like using plugins
For feature requests, an up/down vote system, and then sort feature requests by most liked so devs/us can easily see which features people want more.
A few things. The website runs on Joomla ! (A opensource CMS) with a Kunena Component installed (The forums). So adding ‘big’ changes isn’t going to happen. For example the ability to remove your ‘Thank You’ is something that is entirely Kunena. So changing that is quite dangerous (Since the entire system can break) and second of all it is not ‘HTML’ and PHP like some of you are thinking. Joomla has his own Classes and factories to handle Databases, etc.
To actually ‘enchance’ the forums and the website, they would need to hire or use development power to write Joomla ! Plugins and components.
[quote] Here are just simple idea’s I came up with:
Search bar, so we can find old topics easily.
Maybe to add with the private messaging, party chat as well. [/quote]
Yeah the built-in search feature works great. No need for that update.
And IMO the only party chat we need has been taken care of with the IRC channel and TeamSpeak room - we have text and voice chat options for individuals and groups.
Just my2c on those ideas.
I would suggest dropping this forum system completely and instead using Discourse, which is superior forum software designed “to improve online discussion quality through improved forum software”. It would improve the quality of the content on this forum just by the simple fact that it is actually superior (as stated above, that’s its purpose!).
In particular, it isn’t massively overbloated, and it has all the features that are actually important (which excludes a private messaging system because that’s the most pointless thing ever when you have email and when you have ROBLOX’s message system). Ubuntu, Atom, Discourse itself and some other open source projects use it at the moment. It also happens to be under very active development (in the last week, there have been 18 active authors, 138 commits to all branches and 346 files have been changed).
As far as we’re concerned, switching to Discourse should make it easier:
[ul]
[li]Discourse has a system that would allow integration with ROBLOX’s login system[/li]
[li]Discourse can be configured to require users to be invited to participate in the forum[/li]
[li]Discourse has a Stack Overflow-like reputation/trust system that reduces greatly the need for moderators. And it also has sane defaults that make spam harder and discourage bad quality content.[/li]
[/ul]
Yeah a pm-on-roblox button with the roblox login integration would be nice[/quote]
No, thank you. If I want to send a message to someone, I already know how to do so. I don’t need a button to “help” me doing it (and actually just clutter the interface). Forum software has enough bloat as it is, and a such button would have even less purpose than a button to share a blog post on Facebook (such buttons serve as advertisements for Facebook, so they at least have that purpose, although it is more desirable for Facebook than for the blog readers or authors).
[quote] I would suggest dropping this forum system completely and instead using Discourse, which is superior forum software designed “to improve online discussion quality through improved forum software”. It would improve the quality of the content on this forum just by the simple fact that it is actually superior (as stated above, that’s its purpose!).
In particular, it isn’t massively overbloated, and it has all the features that are actually important (which excludes a private messaging system because that’s the most pointless thing ever when you have email and when you have ROBLOX’s message system). Ubuntu, Atom, Discourse itself and some other open source projects use it at the moment. It also happens to be under very active development (in the last week, there have been 18 active authors, 138 commits to all branches and 346 files have been changed).
As far as we’re concerned, switching to Discourse should make it easier:
[ul]
[li]Discourse has a system that would allow integration with ROBLOX’s login system[/li]
[li]Discourse can be configured to require users to be invited to participate in the forum[/li]
[li]Discourse has a Stack Overflow-like reputation/trust system that reduces greatly the need for moderators. And it also has sane defaults that make spam harder and discourage bad quality content.[/li]
[/ul] [/quote]
Only problem with this is:
So I doubt any of that would happen, sadly, however nice it may be.
Yeah a pm-on-roblox button with the roblox login integration would be nice[/quote]
No, thank you. If I want to send a message to someone, I already know how to do so. I don’t need a button to “help” me doing it (and actually just clutter the interface). Forum software has enough bloat as it is, and a such button would have even less purpose than a button to share a blog post on Facebook (such buttons serve as advertisements for Facebook, so they at least have that purpose, although it is more desirable for Facebook than for the blog readers or authors).[/quote]
Ok, but not everyone:
Wants to use their personal email for internet contact
Has a manageable amount of messages in their ROBLOX inbox
I think an on-site messaging system is a perfectly viable, focused means of communication in and among the devs.
Wants to use their personal email for internet contact
Has a manageable amount of messages in their ROBLOX inbox
I think an on-site messaging system is a perfectly viable, focused means of communication in and among the devs. [/quote]
Nobody has to use his personal email address for this, and creating a new inbox doesn’t make you get less messages: it only means that the messages are in a different place, and that you need to manage a new inbox. If anything, it makes it less manageable.
Also, many of us are also available on Twitter, freenode, Steam, GitHub or TeamSpeak, in addition to email and ROBLOX (which itself offers many communication means). I don’t see why we need another communication system.
Wants to use their personal email for internet contact
Has a manageable amount of messages in their ROBLOX inbox
I think an on-site messaging system is a perfectly viable, focused means of communication in and among the devs. [/quote]
Nobody has to use his personal email address for this, and creating a new inbox doesn’t make you get less messages: it only means that the messages are in a different place, and that you need to manage a new inbox. If anything, it makes it less manageable.
Also, many of us are also available on Twitter, freenode, Steam, GitHub or TeamSpeak, in addition to email and ROBLOX (which itself offers many communication means). I don’t see why we need another communication system.[/quote]
If you don’t want to use your personal email address, then you end up with a separate inbox anyway - so it would make more sense for the inbox [size=2]REGARDING DEVS[/size] to be here on the forums [size=2]REGARDING DEVS[/size].
And messages in a different place makes sense if you want to make yourself available to a different/specific group.
If I was getting 100 messages a day on ROBLOX I wouldn’t want to have to dig through them to find anything important from my fellow devs. I would much rather just log into these forums, where I KNOW all the messages I receive would be from my fellow devs.
It’s the same idea behind Google’s priority inbox - it categorizes your inbox into 3 separate areas making it (overall) easier to manage by sorting them. More can be less.
This is my reason for suggesting the messaging system, and I feel it covers your second point as well - this would just be a focused point for discussion with a focused group of people (which, by the way, is the reason for all of those separate conversation applications in the first place).
To take it to an absurd level, I could compare what you’re saying about one-source messages to these forums themselves. Why not just make a new sub-forum on the main ROBLOX site that anyone could post in?
Because there’s too many users (and therefore too much content) to manage, and you can’t limit who is in or who is out.
