Hopefully this feedback is useful. I don’t think the developer forum is a place that I really feel like I can have genuine high quality discussions anymore–it’s more of a place to share things and learn more about whatever updates Roblox is pushing (especially initiatives).
However, in terms of a forum–a place to discuss things–it’s really lacking. I don’t think I’m the only developer who has this same feeling. I’ve tried to distill down why this is a problem, and maybe how to fix it.
tl;dr: The forum is setup to be hostile to any real discussion (it’s heavily deprioritized), and doesn’t solicit any discussion as a primary thing. It’s being used to push Roblox initiatives–fine, but it’s a horrible place to have a good discussion, which is what I, as a developer want.
I proposed a solution in the article, but honestly, I’m not sure if it’s good. What is important is I think there’s a general sentiment among roblox developers that the developer forum is… lacking.
Update: Structual changes were made! Yay!
I’m leaving this forum thread up to discuss these changes, and additional feedback that was given in this thread!
You are definitely not the only developer feeling this. Honestly, I am no fan of the DevForum at all. I thought it was so cool when I first wanted to join it, but when I finally got in what did I realize? Most people on DevForum care more about just being right and getting their forum stats up rather than actually helping. People are literally looking for every flaw, every mistake you make and then picking on it just so they can get a solution or something.
It just doesn’t feel like the community I expected, and I and my friends also have discussed this. We don’t feel comfortable even doing or saying anything or even appearing on DevForum with the chance of being embarrassed or coming out feeling like you did something wrong. This is not a community this is just a hub, a information place, something needs to change.
And btw, I would’ve made a post like this too the only thing stopping me is I am litterlly to afraid of saying something like this without the fear of being extremely censored and probably having my post flagged or something.
Edit
Basically people on DevForum feel fake. Like they are trying to be nice but in reality it’s not the same as a supportive community people want. I’d rather prefer developer discords or scripting helpers (which I go to most of the time instead of here, where I feel much better supported and treated) People want to help, genuinely explain why I made a mistake and treat me like its progress. Of course, my intention is not to be rude about the DevForum but I am serious.
All of the real development discussion–the useful articles, the latest techniques–have fled the forums. People blame this on Roblox being permissive with new users, but I don’t buy it. There’s plenty of other forums that have real activity despite open registration being available.
I think we all want the same community you talked about.
The tragedy is that I’m pretty sure this didn’t have to happen.
I agree with you. That post was a good explanation on how the devforum was really filled up with public announcements and the actual discussions being filled up with pinned posts. I think ROBLOX should redo the forum to make it a place to discuss about development rather than making it a place for public announcements and pinned posts.
I stopped checking the forums almost entirely. It’s just full of people giving incorrect ‘solutions’ and low-quality discussions, on top of dozens of “buy my map pls how much this worth!?!1!” posts. No real discussions, and any that do come up usually get falsely flagged.
What was the point of removing the public forums then opening up a once semi-professional forum to the public for all the old forum users to flood into and also ruin lol
Honestly, I stopped making posts on the Dev Forum all together. Every time I make a post here, I just feel like someone is going to take it the wrong way, or I’m going to use the wrong terms and someone is going to write an essay on why I don’t deserve oxygen. I just don’t feel like its worth it anymore. I understand that some people just want to be helpful, but the amount of hostility that comes with some of these posts is just un-needed. Right now, I think it’s just a race to turn from New Member to Member as quick as possible or Member to Top Contributor, so on and so forth.
Maybe we can get a system tweak, because I think that its the majority of the problem. Full credit to Roblox though for trying opening up the forum to everyone because there is still good content on here, I think it just needs some major changes like the suggested changes in the @Quenty’s Medium post.
Because of this, I am a lot more active in Scripting Helpers, because there isn’t so much tension there as there is here.
I agree Roblox should entirely redo the DevForum with dramatic changes with a whole new focus. The focus of discussion. I don’t think a few small tweaks will really surface.
I am also tired of getting entire 4-5 paragraph messages each time I word or phrase a single line or sentence wrong in a multi-paragraph response. Seriously, I get it, I made a mistake. Why not just quickly explain it and let me learn from it and fix my mistake. Why is there the need to feel so confident and right about finding my mistake to the point I have to exit that message questioning my ability to make good responses?
To be honest, I haven’t experienced any of this behavior, but that’s incredibly toxic, and really isn’t a great component to a good community. Strong moderation action would be useful here.
I agree. I mean the other kind of problem is it seems to depend on people. Honestly, I hate bringing this up at all, it really leaves a bad taste in my mouth. But I’ve seen situations where the same person in different posts has treated a new member one way for saying something and when say a top contributor says the same thing, they reply super kindly and act as if nothing happened. Extremely toxic and kind of sad. I am not surprised you have not experienced this behavior. You have been an awesome top developer for a long time and you are pretty well respected, so I am not surprised people want to not go against you so directly. Of course I am not just talking about me, but really other people as well. I have seen this happen to other people and its disappointing.
But yeah, it is in no way a good component of a good community.
Yeah, to an extent, this is ok, but it also hurts if I fail to get any real feedback from my posts. Having candid responses is really important in the game development process. So I guess this sort of double standard is doubly bad.
I definitely feel this way about DevForum. I have practically stopped posting here, I feel as if my posts always get misinterpreted and overlooked. People love to criticize and point out the flaws in my post instead of throughly explaining my mistake. Getting the “solution” is everyone’s motive to helping out others. A lot of members here are very hostile, as mentioned before. There is a lot of tension; people are treating DevForum as a hierarchy.
Overall, the community can use a few improvements. However, DevForum is a good community.
Yeah. I think this artificial hierarchy that exists here is something I, and some of the people I talked to about this article, might be missing. I’ve been on the devforum since the beginning, so this separate perspective from you all is really valuable.
I mean, I was definitely aware of the forum as a status symbol, but it sounds like it’s created a really hidden toxic culture that’s been hidden away from some of the people with real power to change things, especially Roblox staff.
This is a great example of constructive feedback we would like to hear from our community. We will read through the article along with the feedback in the comments to explore potential solutions going forward.
There will be more individual follow ups with various folks on this thread & Quenty. We will be including our community top forum contributors in the discussions to ensure we are taking the right approach as we read through & propose solutions.
Yeah, I guess the pain is different. It must be bad on your end as well never getting a real honest reply. People just give you positive 10/10 feed back all the time. I’d honestly hate that, and probably end up developing an insecurity of if my work is really good or not.
I agree with this, as I am pretty entry level myself with creating games on Roblox (not with programming), I don’t really have those contacts that will give me constructive criticism. I feel like I missing contacts like game breakers or like white hats to give me security tips and such. I really can’t find these kinds of people who have a passion to help people, like the big time guys may have.
Heh, was somewhat worried coming into this thread that it would be another silly “New users are a problem!!” rant, but this is quite well put together.
I can’t speak too much from a personal point how much the front page encourages discussion for me since I always stick with the New tab and scroll through everything there.
I would note though that another thing which may be hurting discussion here is the fact that the forum has a Discord server? There’s nothing wrong with having it, and it has to be doing some good for discussion if that’s where a lot of discussion is at. I’d imagine this is due to the structure of conversation there. Quick and casual.
It does have the downside of the fact that due to being in Discord though, being more of a chatroom rather than a forum, that discussions can’t really be held in the long term across several days unless someone were to REALLY push for that and keep digging the topic back up.
Not quite sure there is an easy way to encourage conversation to move from there to here. Hopefully the changes detailed in the article would entice more users to discuss here?
I’ve noticed what you mention in your article and I think there is a lot of concerns with ease of access and what users want to see. For me, the forums should be a great place for helpful collaborative talk, when often times it feels like a place for people to analyze my work, whether or not I want constructive feedback.
And I think some changes that could possibly be made are these:
Encourage new community members to create awesome new creations for the benefit of the community (eg., some awesome open source creations I’ve seen in the past which I haven’t been able to find but know exist.)
Understand that the information everyone sees first often times feels redundant, as many community members already see the community announcements everywhere else, such as social media and other Roblox-linked sites.
Understand that you can contribute without pointing out the flaws before you point out the cool things (it’s easy to point out a flaw, but it can be more helpful to point out what’s working well).
I hope I’m not missing the mark, but this is my piece in this conversation.
So I mean, I think ease of access is important, but in reality, it’s just a heavy deprioritization of the actual things I care about accessing. So it’s not really about the ease of access of those forums, but rather, what it signifies from Roblox’s end, and what other top developers are reading into things when they see that.
There’s been little to no deep thought about these issues on Roblox’s side.
