How hard would have it been to make a post in 10 seconds that said “Hey, we’ve disabled CDUP for security reasons. Cheers!” ? This is a recurring thing – it gets kind of annoying when you change something and then tell no one about it. If it’s temporary, and you don’t know if you’re going to keep it disabled or not and don’t want to post for that reason, you could easily have added “We may enable it again – we’re just not sure yet.”
[ul]
[li]The dev console. How many threads have been just here “omg dev console is broken!” 10 seconds to make a thread “btw, we disabled the dev console as a temporary fix for a serious exploit.” would have saved us all the trouble of confusion[/li]
[li]Outines -_-[/li]
[li]Max decal resolution to 1024x1024 / no more decal autoscale. People are still uploading images onto dinky 585x559 shirts because they don’t know these two issues have been resolved[/li]
[li]Inability to use animations created by other players with rbxassetid; you told us, but I’ve been asked by numerous people “omg why aren’t my animations working anymore!?”[/li]
[li]wtf is this explorer filter thing[/li]
[/ul]
[ul]
[li]The CSG rewrite that broke old unions – Adamintygum gave us a wonderful, advanced notice so we could take apart unions before the change happened instead of it being “Oh, we changed it – sucks to suck.”[/li]
[/ul]
I don’t think I can fit this in the title, but if I could, I would change the title from “so we don’t have to find out the hard way” to “so we don’t have to find out the hard way (or not at all)”
I updated the changelog with cdup and dev console. We usually don’t mention security-related changes (note that rbxassetid:// is also security related) there, but I guess we should mention them if they impact devs a lot.
Outlines were created before we had any good communication means with developers, if I recall correctly.
Can’t speak for decals or explorer filter.
You have to keep in mind that the ROBLOX devs are busy working on new features (terrain!) and might not always have time to document releases. Obviously what would be better is that the features are documented in the code as the code is written, and on release it uses that documentation. But then again, we can’t have nice things for a reason.
There are engineers and there are community managers. The community managers should be the ones who inform us, and the engineers have to write a really simple memo to get it done.
We tried this model with the changelog before. We got a changelog that was updated from the internal ticket database (e.g. features that we release on prod). The changelog entries were frequently incorrect, important features were missing, etc.
This makes perfect sense - the developer of a feature or a fix is the only person who knows how to best describe it. This is why the current model is that developers are responsible for updating changelog, notifying the community about huge changes beforehand (i.e. see local script/throttling/insert service/etc. updates in Updates forum). Sometimes they forget because this practice is fairly recent; sometimes the changelog is updated only after the feature goes fully live (e.g. I believe explorer filter is not live).
I’m a little annoyed that the list in the original post only mentions one issue about us communicating the change clearly when the reality is very different. This is called a negativity bias and we should all try to avoid it.
Threads serve one purpose only and anything not related to that belongs in threads elsewhere. This thread was discussing the lack of communication between the ROBLOX staff and players/developers when it comes to new/changed/removed features, and anything other than that would be off-topic, and should be posted in other threads – this includes praise. Even including that Adamintygum did an excellent job relaying that CSG information was a bit off-topic. Don’t assume that I have only negative memories because I didn’t turn a “please inform us more” into a “THANK YOU FOR ALL THE TIMES YOU INFORMED US” thread – in fact, it would have been horribly and awkwardly confusing if I did. I’m aware and extremely grateful for all of the things you do for us, but that’s not the purpose of this thread.
btw, you could use checklists for feature implementation – if you already have them, then that makes it easier. Just add “Notify users of update” to the end.