Roblox's Path to an Independent DevForum Website

Forum Help Forum Features
#1

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to fully realize the potential of our community’s collaboration and communication on the current Developer Forum. While the forum has evolved over the years, transitioning from “RBXDev” to “DevForum” and now simply Developer Forum, it has consistently relied on third-party solutions such as Kunena and, most recently, Discourse Meta for its functionality.

The use of Discourse Meta does bring some benefits, offering tools for moderation and remote management by Roblox employees. However, there are inherent limitations, particularly when it comes to addressing critical issues within the “Forum Features” and “Forum Bugs” categories. In these areas, it’s evident that the majority of responses come from the employee Hooksmith.

Let me clarify that I have immense respect for Hooksmith, who is one of my idols at Roblox. However, it is quite disheartening when, despite their best efforts, user suggestions often face obstacles, be it due to complexity or a lack of immediate resources, mainly because of the forum’s reliance on Discourse Meta. A few examples of such discussions can be seen below:

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Given this situation, it becomes increasingly challenging for Roblox developers to see their suggestions come to fruition, as they lack the necessary control and tools to enact meaningful changes.

To address this issue effectively, I strongly believe that Roblox Corp should take the initiative to create and maintain its independent website for the Developer Forum. This platform should empower our engineers to exercise greater control over the forum’s features and functionalities, allowing them to tailor the user interface and user experience to our specific needs. This approach is in line with the exciting developments showcased at RDC’23, where Roblox offered a sneak peek into the enhanced interfaces and user experiences for the Roblox Studio application.

If Roblox can address this issue by developing its own dedicated Developer Forum website, it would significantly improve my development experience. It would foster a more dynamic and responsive environment where developers can actively shape the tools and resources available to them. This, in turn, would lead to more productive collaboration, faster issue resolution, and an overall enhanced development experience for all Roblox creators.

It’s important to note that everyone is free to agree or disagree with this proposal, and I respect all opinions. Open dialogue and diverse perspectives are essential in shaping the future of our developer community.

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#2

It’s already possible to modify Discourse through the use of plugins, I wrote a good few when I was a community sage. For example, the “Roblox profile” button when you click on a profile is plugin code. Without context it’s hard to say for sure but what I expect Hooksmith is trying to get across is that Roblox didn’t build the forum software, and thus also doesn’t have a team dedicated to working on it like you would expect if Roblox did build it. If whatever you were asking for doesn’t seem impactful enough for a plugin then I definitely can’t expect that rebuilding the forums (which is what I think you’re asking for? I’m not sure) is also within scope.

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#3

Hey @Kampfkarren,

First, I hope you’re doing well! Secondly, yes, my entire feature request centers around the idea of Roblox completely rebranding our current forum, but without depending on any third-party forum software. In response to the point you mentioned – “Roblox didn’t build the forum software, and thus also doesn’t have a team dedicated to working on it” – it certainly raises some concerns. While it’s true that you can leverage Discourse plugins (something I wasn’t aware of, as I haven’t been a Community Sage or worked directly with Discourse Meta), there are undoubtedly limitations that can’t be overcome easily.

I genuinely believe that, at some point, Roblox should consider investing in building a new forum concept, one that’s more agile, respectful of our needs, and supported by a dedicated team capable of introducing innovative features. When I contemplate these factors, I can’t help but see it as an opportunity for the Creator Success team, especially considering their “Creator Hub” project. It’s about fostering growth, enhancing engagement, and providing a better platform for our community. :blush:

#4

Can you link the issues you are talking about?

The one the quote is from is a minor visual display issue that I wouldn’t deem as “critical”.

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#5

Hey @Hooksmith,

How are you? I hope you are doing well.

First of all, I’ve linked some examples I had in mind, and you are free to analyze them at your convenience and reply to my comment.

Forum Features

Please make the forum more accessible and navigable - #2 by Hooksmith We should be allowed to post videos with larger memory - #10 by Hooksmith Unable to edit the title and tags in feature requests and bug reports from Bug Support - #6 by Hooksmith

Forum Bugs

Image Property Buttons Are Nonfunctional In Bug Report Wizard - #3 by Hooksmith Notification Number Isn't Centered - #13 by Hooksmith Translation Problem - #2 by Hooksmith Mobile app start screen layout glitching when screen is rotated - #5 by Hooksmith

Now that’s out of the way, I want to sincerely address one of the things that has raised some eyebrows, which is the categorization of issue severity:

Whether it’s categorized as low, medium, high, or critical, I believe it’s not the best idea to respond discreetly with a “no” or “that is not possible for us”, especially when it comes to Discourse features. It’s not ideal to suggest someone pass a feature request directly to Discourse Meta without knowing how to contact staff directly. This should be handled by teams dedicated to the forum. If they don’t have enough resources to address important matters or optimize the developer UX, then what’s the benefit of relying on Discourse Meta, even if it’s considered “the future of the internet for the next 10 years”? It’s like having the latest technology but using it in the most restricted and limited way possible, which doesn’t seem like “as good as it gets” to me.

Thank you for your understanding, and I look forward to further discussing these issues with you.

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#6

Important to mention here for feature requests for the forum and for feature requests in general (#feature-requests) is that it’s not going to be our goal to complete all the feature requests exactly as they are written as that is not feasible. Not everything is aligned or worth the engineering investment compared to the outcome or to other on-going projects. Rejecting a feature request or bug report like above is my courtesy to you to let you know we can’t prioritize it. The alternative is that you never see a response at all, which is bad.

Some of these solutions are misaligned, not things we want to implement. For example, even if we weren’t on Discourse, I somewhat doubt we would allow you to upload >10MB video files. The forum shouldn’t be used as a large file storage. If you want to host art, it’s better to use a dedicated tool for that.

Discourse themes => even if we moved to our own forum software, we would not have anything outside of dark/light theme.

Title/tag updates => this is not a rejection, I explicitly said we are being conservative for now so won’t address it straight away, due to other incoming changes.

The other threads seem minor feedback about small visual glitches.

4 Likes
#7

Hey @Hooksmith!

I thank you for the friendly debate and I will consider all of your points of view. I continue to admit that you are a super professional who inspires me a lot. :smiley:

#8

I agree, but the maintenance is not really deemed as necessary according to the forum team. I’ve reported multiple bugs that were very small attention-to-detail issues, and none of them were solved (except the roblox logo one). It makes sense because there’s not very many issues with the forum, or some issues are just not fixable by Roblox but rather by Discourse.

It might just be the lack of people on the forum team, the risks and challenges of adding or fixing minor features on the forum, or both.

But I will say that they’ve fixed a couple bugs I’ve reported, yet the most critical one still remains unfixed:

This issue is most noticeable in the search bar, but I’ve lacked that information in my report to maintain simplicity. The point being the forum team is probably very busy and does not have time to fix or read bug reports (same with @Bug-Support). This is an ongoing issue with the forum team that simply is the nature of them being so small. If there were more members, it means more management. I wouldn’t say that the forum needs an overhaul in management yet, but it sure does seem like it would in larger capacity or complexity.

I don’t believe this directly relates to the software the forum uses. It does play a factor, but as far as I know, there’s many forum frameworks out there, but investing the time and money into making your own is not viable economically for Roblox I’d assume, nor is it necessary. Discourse is very customizable. Makes me think we should include @pyxfluff since I’ve recently been informed that they are very knowledgeable with the forum software, and they can confirm or deny some of these examples.

#9

If you are suggesting moving to a custom forum, I very, very strongly disagree. I have become very familiar with Discourse and it’s keybinds, the layout, the features, and custom themes which I have on here. I would likely stop using this forum all together if Roblox were to stop using Discourse. The Roblox forums sucked, and a custom forum would likely be like the Talent Hub. Horrible UX, lots of wasted space, missing features vs. Discourse, and text filtering. Do you really want that?

In terms of the bugs, I believe that the root cause is that Roblox is using the Stable branch of Discourse, which is missing a lot of new features and bug fixes, proven here:
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(tests-passed is at Discourse 3.2.0.beta2-dev). If Roblox were to upgrade to the tests-passed branch, it would likely eliminate long standing bugs, however, it may break or compromise some custom plugins on here, which shouldn’t be too hard to fix, with my experience using Discourse plugins/themes.

In my experience of managing Discourse instances, it is very hard to scale and keep up with, which is partly why you find all of those bugs. Rebuilding and migrating can take hours at scale just to update to a small revision and the servers are constantly being loaded due to all of the traffic.

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