Or just bolden it.
1 Like
It was planned for a while before this topic was made, but yes it definitely addresses some of this feedback given here.
Any feedback given by developers in this forum category definitely is taken into consideration in any case. Both DevRel and Sages read this category actively and we discuss almost everything mentioned here internally, that’s why it’s so important to give feedback.
2 Likes
I feel like a follow up about this in particular might be well received and give you an idea of some of the limitations we face:
We send feedback messages to users who flag posts for the wrong reasons. These aren’t usually malicious, but if flags feel malicious we’ll definitely take action.
That’s part of a bigger problem, though: the sensitivity of the flagging system. We’re currently extremely limited by the forum software in how well we can customize the automatically hide posts based on active flags functionality. The good news is that we’re working on a plugin to change this functionality. The bad news is that we don’t have a good answer in the meantime.
Moving on from that specific subject, I wanted to just reiterate for transparency that we’re going ahead with the focus groups. 
6 Likes
This is great but even then the problem seems to be more apparent by the day as more members join DevForum. This is more of bandaid solution, it really doesn’t solve the problem that is at the core of this entire situation. That DevForum is incorrectly organized, does not present rules properly to new members, does not specify expectations properly, and has no proper system to teach, help and guide new members. Until this changes for the better and gets solved, I don’t think this problem is being fixed any time soon. In fact, with the growing number of members joining this forum, without a proper system implimented soon, the problem may just get a lot worse.
I heavily agree with the sentiment in the main post, however I think the following two-fold approach would be preferable to that which the OP proposes.
Prefer tags in favor of subcategories.
Currently, topics are generalized via category & subcategory, tags feel almost like an afterthought. Because of this, categories & subcategories have become increasingly specific (Dev. Support; Scripting Support, Building Support, Art Design Support). This is, in my opinion, a misuse of categories; which are supposed to be broad themes that topics under them have in common. And so, the splash page of the forum has become overburdened by the amount of categories and takes on a horribly cluttered appearance
(So much so that I have to zoom out incredibly far to screenshot the entire thing! For ease of readability I’ve labeled each category in a bigger font.)
However, even at a cursory glance we can immediately see that a number of these categories are all very closely related (check how many have “Development” in their name or description.)
As such, I believe that the following categories should be subsumed by the category “Development”, with each of their subcategories collapsed into a more broad subcategory of the “Development” category. From there, tags should be used instead to denote more specific themes of topics posted in these categories.
Were this implemented, the forum’s splash page would look more so like this
Move away from the problem-solution paradigm and instead to a question-answer one.
As many users have stated thus far in this thread, the problem-solution paradigm creates a number of issues:
- Users, especially those seeking to attain a higher trust level, feel pressured to reply the fastest so that their answer is accepted by virtue of it being the first, functional, answer.
- This leads to under-developed or even incorrect answers, including answers which don’t actually attempt to solve or, sometimes, don’t even pertain to the topic as a result of the reply-er misinterpreting the question while reading it in a rush to answer.
- Accepted answers are seen as the end-all be-all answers, which is a fundamentally flawed idea given the open-ended-ness of a lot of questions (especially programming-wise!)
Because of this, I think Q&A topics should instead use a system familiar to that of Stack Overflow and the like, wherein answers may be voted on (and are consequently ordered by their score) by community members. This solves the issue of the race to post first & the closed-ness of the problem-solution paradigm.
Inspiration could be taken from this discourse plugin.
Misc.
These are much smaller solutions to issues I have which I don’t feel are as needed as those listed above.
Misuse of flagging.
Unfortunately, discourse’s flagging system isn’t as granular as one might hope it to be; from my cursory inspection of their API there is no way to change which trust levels can flag & the influence of flags per specific trust levels (aside from # of trust level 3 users needed to block accounts).
However, I think by way of using plugins that interface with things like Google’s Perspective API, the # of flags needed to hide posts could be increased such that it’s harder for posts to be hidden due to the misuse of the flagging feature by new users (to be honest, it kind of bothers me that new users are trusted with ability to report posts, but at the same time are prevented from speaking in the #public category, likely due to a (justified) lack of faith in the decorum of new members; unfortunately as I mentioned above, there is little granularity in terms of flagging permissions).
International Users
Speaking honestly, I think it’s kind of absurd that Int’l has essentially been ‘quarantined’ to its own little box. By doing so, the forum essentially deprives Int’l users from the organization that English-speaking users benefit from. I personally think the Int’l category should be disbanded, and instead an International tag should be introduced.
I also think it would be to the benefit of both Int’l and english-speaking users if a translation plugin (such as “Discourse Translator”) were introduced.
Feature Voting
Lastly, and probably least importantly, I think it’d be cool if a feature-voting plugin was introduced for topics in the #forum-feedback & #platform-feedback categories (which, I think, should be condense to a feedback category with subcategories for client, studio, and the forum/meta, with tags for 'bug’s and 'feature’s & devices (PC, Console, Phone))
RDC
I don’t personally believe RDC necessitates its own category, I think it’s better suited to be a subcategory of Public. Announcements and Q&A could just be pinned topics.
All in all, I think the forum should look like this:
Although it goes without saying: I’m open to suggestions/refinements.
4 Likes
Thanks for the feedback! Just addressing a few things, but we did read all of it.
We already are working on this. We were hesitant to enable it here because most of the support categories have a lot of questions that don’t really fit the stackoverflow model, i.e. art design support where answers are subjective for about >50% of the topics there, and game design support where it’s more of a discussion than questions and answers.
The discourse-question-answer plugin also isn’t polished that heavily. We need to do some work on it before we feel like we can enable it here.
It’s something we could look into testing on Scripting Support and seeing how that goes.
Unfortunately we have looked into this one but we can’t do it because the cost would be too high.
We already have a voting plugin on the forum, it’s just not enabled in any categories. We’re still thinking about the best way to have people vote for features.
RDC category will be hidden shortly. I think they’re only waiting to post a final topic about some RDC photos, and after that RDC 2019 is a closed book.
In an ideal world (with perhaps a more mature audience / audience that pays more attention to details) this would work like a charm, but in practice here we have seen that users do not have a clue how to tag their topics properly, while they do generally get the subcategory correctly, because it’s more prominently featured in the edit window and on the post.
We can’t really attach semantics to tags, while we can give some pre-formatted text in the edit window related to the category + categories in the edit window have the first sentence of their respective About posts attached to them. This is why subcategories seems superior to me over tags. We can probably reduce the category list further by getting rid of some redundant categories though.
3 Likes
Ah, that’s good to hear. All the plugins I linked were solely for example, I didn’t actually expect any of them to be integrated (especially due to most of them being under copy-left licenses).
Cost as in literal pricing for the translation APIs? That’s disappointing, but definitely understandable.
I’m familiar with that process, but I think it’d be neat if the RDC category was made into a subcategory of public and left there all year round (with the pins updated for each RDC) to foster discussion about it all-year-round, but it’s not something I have much conviction about.
That’s also disappointing, but not entirely unexpected.
2 Likes
I think this is a Discourse requirement actually – plugins need to be open-source.
If you’re interested, we store all the plugins we’re working on here: https://github.com/roblox-dev-forum
Yeah, since we have such a large amount of content on this forum and a lot of people that would want to make use of such a feature, the cost would ramp up super quickly. There were some stories online about some users getting thousands of dollars of bills in their first month, and since we’re one of the largest Discourse forum out there, such amounts are probably not out of the question. There’s a lot of content on this forum…
For next year we will probably suggest they put it as a subcategory to Public, that seems pretty tidy to me. 
2 Likes
That makes sense; I was moreso wary of the fact that they were copy-left and not permissive, so any work featuring it would need to also be under that license (and have the copyright notices included), which I thought may have been a problem since enterprises tend to want to use more restrictive licenses.
Haha, my bad, to be honest I hadn’t done my due diligence in investigating how taxing such a thing would be.
Good to hear that it’ll be considered.
2 Likes
I have noticed that people don’t give feedback to people that are asking for it. Not to be mean, but I have noticed a trend where people ask for feedback and everybody says it’s great when it’s not. People need to be honest when giving feedback. There are also the people that ask for feedback and when somebody tells them what they can improve upon, they get mad. The bottom line is the toxicity and “fakeness” needs to go, Roblox should be doing something about this. I didn’t want to bump, I just wanted to express my feelings.
3 Likes
Both of these afaik are against the rules and can be flagged
[ unconstructive feedback and reposting the same feedback ]
It’s an interesting topic.
And we will see what the resolution is to iy.
I would love to see the devforum with focus on the Help section & less toxidity.
The developer forum is becoming more toxic. Smaller developers are preyed on by those who obtain large egos and always belittle you and compare you to someone larger than you in terms of popularity. It’s not healthy.
Smaller developers like myself, find it hard to form relationships with other larger developers as we’re always overlooked, and it’s a “status game” at this point. There is no solution to this, unless you can change people’s mindsets, which is very unlikely. It drives me away from developing, and why I don’t add to my portfolio anymore. You receive unconstructive criticism to drive down your morale.
Though it’s hard to change this, I know there is a way to solve this, I just don’t know how.
9 Likes
My personal focus on this argument is geared toward everyone, but I 100% agree the small developers are a huge victim in this issue. I felt it when I first joined too, and I can not hardly imagine how it must feel now. I don’t mean small developers as new ones, but just skilled but not yet popular yet. The line between small developers and new developers is seriously becoming invisible in DevForum with a proper member approval process removed. There are a lot of new small developers who really have the skills and maturity to be here, and then there are new developers who don’t have the skills but also seem to not have the maturity to be here either.
I agree with you, we definitely need to make DevForum more of a community once again and not a social media and self promotion like platform for larger more established developers who just need to boost their own self image on a meant to be helping community by putting others down, making everyone think they are the best, just so they can be seen as the best. And this platform shouldn’t be used by smaller developers who are overly obsessed with fame and popularity rather then using the DevForum for its true purpose, helping with development issues. Like those who act like each post is a step toward raising their imaginary “reputation points” and not seeing every new job as a new addition to their own popularity
2 Likes
It’s blatantly obvious that the line between them is blurred, I’ve been developing for a very long time, but I get seen as a less experienced developer. It’s more damaging to other developers than it is to me, because I’m used to it.
This community is just segregated.
1 Like
Ignore the developer community then. Make a nice game and you will have a lot of players to appreciate your work, fans that will support you on your new projects. To them, there will be no difference between you and top developers, if they are enjoying the games.
3 Likes
No offense, but that answer makes no sense. The reasoning behind this whole argument is that this developer community isn’t even being used for its original purpose (of helping people) but rather used for self promotion and publicity. The forums do have a purpose, helping developers. It is needed. The problem is right now its useless because its not focusing on what its supposed to do.
This isn’t something like Twitter where you just back off and try doing your own thing if you can’t compete with top developers, this is a help community. There shouldn’t even be a separation between any developers. People shouldn’t have to feel forced to leave just because they can’t compete in popularity in a community like this. I mean come on, this is a support forum, why is it seen as okay to turn this into a social media site just for ROBLOX, basically turn it into a marketing platform?
None taken.
ashcide complained mostly about the prejudice of the developers and how he lost motivation, and I suggested that he should ignore all the pointless demoralisation and remember that there will always be people to appreciate his work as long as he creates something.
For seeking help, I completely support the topic, but its up to Roblox to fix that. We pointed out our complaints as developers, now we wait until they hear us.
2 Likes
how many times have people said this to no avail
We have been planning out some changes for the past 1-2 months or so and will be applying it later today together with DevRel. Thanks for your patience.
2 Likes