This discussion has come up a few times in the past and there’s good points for and against us having a badge that shows that we’re a member here. I’ve always argued for this simply on the grounds that people can and will claim to be RBXDev to trick others into doing what they want.
A friend of mine has recently had a run-in with a person like that, and while I was able to calm him down and assure him it was just a stunt, many others aren’t as lucky and fall for this stuff.
Unfortunately, this particular case happened over Skype, but I’m sure some of this goes on over PMs and ingame chat on ROBLOX as well. He’s given me a transcript of the entire conversation here: http://pastebin.com/pWRTBkGF
Some screenshots of the actual conversation showing the highlights of the conversation:
[spoiler]
Then this screenshot was sent (which to any of you will be an obvious fake):
I should explain that this friend has been working hard to try and get into RBXDev, and the “blacklist” he’s been threatened with allegedly prevents him from ever becoming a member.
Full summary is: Person messages my friend, asks him to build some car, friend declines offer and asks for evidence of membership, person threatens to “blacklist” from becoming a member if friend does not comply.[/spoiler]
I think this underlines the issue with there not being an official way to check if someone is a member here, as well as people generally not knowing who or what this community really is. There should be some official way to check if someone’s a member here so that this fear-mongering among users can come to an end. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen it, and I’m sure there’s tons of cases of this that no one has ever heard about.
What’s your thoughts? If not by badges or some other good way to verify our membership, how can we prevent this stuff from happening in the future?
I think what would help also is to stick extra information in a public post, that explains exactly what forum members can and cannot do on the forum. For example it can explicitly state that forum members do not have any extra say in moderation. i.e.
I actually came across a twitter a while back claiming to be Cottonman, me. He obviously didn’t just my name thinking it was cool or anything (it’s not) because he made his bio “I like to build stuff - in RBXDev”. Also, according to some of his tweets, he had been scamming and instigating people big time. So, as much as an ego-booster it would be, I feel like a RBXDev badge/title or something, will help cut down on this.
I disagree. Younger people will put in effort to become better developers so they can make it into RbxDev; I don’t see a problem with that.
Anecdotally, the sole reason I can build is because I put in a ton of practice to be accepted into EBR when I was young. I wanted to join them for the same reasons you just described: EBR were the cool kids on the block, and joining them would mean status.
I don’t know about status, but that practice made me a hell of a lot better at expressing my ideas in 3D. That’s probably a skill I’ll use for the rest of my life.
And who in their right mind would go through the trouble of becoming a skilled game developer in order to get into a forum about game development, and all the while remain completely uninterested in developing games?
Maybe the rank “new user” could be renamed to something else that reflects better that they are really not a member yet. Such as “visitor” for example. Or maybe “none” so that it’ll say “Trust level: none”.
Access to the devforums does not give you any authority. It is not an achievement.
It should only serve as a direct line of communication to the engineers and other developers.
I can relate with this, especially since i’m one of the few users here who have zero knowledge about working in studio. It would confuse a lot of people.
Again, the problem we’re trying to solve is that scammers can project authority by pretending to be in RbxDev and kids don’t have an obvious way to verify that. They’re usually inclined to treat who they think are RbxDev members as authorities; a badge won’t change that.
This thread doesn’t seem to be limited to discussion about badges either. If there’s a better way of protecting kids against these scams, we should discuss it.
