I completely agree. While I don’t think being more inclusive with who we accept as @Nexx suggested would be a good approach, I do agree with him that being more open would help alleviate the things people imagine about the devforums. For instance, making some of the categories public might help.
Not sure why this was flagged…
It’s a passive-aggressive jab at the community that doesn’t contribute anything constructive.
Would be nice if there was a public Members page or something on this forum. That would be enough IMO.
Edit: Is /users public?
Edit 2: YES, /users is public. Why not just direct users to that? You can just search for the username of someone in order to verify it.
The irony here is great, your post was flagged too
@EchoReaper That user still has their right to their opinion, though?
That list includes everyone who has visited devforums at least once, not just people who are listed as “member” FYI
Weird. Perhaps just make sure the user has posted to a forum?
Yes that works, checking if posts/topics is non-zero, unless the user was kicked from the forum (there’s not many examples anyway so you can basically neglect that case)
hey @whoever keeps on flagging opinions, please stop because you’re just enforcing your own opinion and blocking out others. first sign of totalitarianism
other than that; i disagree with badges, but has anyone noticed OP was deleted from these forums. this thread is going in circles, is it even relevant anymore?
Those posts didn’t get flagged because of totalitarianism – they were flagged because they’re not appropriate for the forum. Anyone is free to have their own opinions, but if they choose to share them, they need to do so appropriately. The devforums were created to avoid the current state of the ROBLOX forums – not breed the same level of discussion.
Wasn’t rude, derogatory, or insulting, I mean, unless you defend Martin Shkreli, but even in my post, I brought him up in a positive light, saying that the outcome of his actions was positive. I insulted the lounge, but that place deserves insulting (if you are of the opinion that this should strictly be a professional-only forum, which I am not), Lol.
As far as being constructive… those were literally the only three methods I could think of, I wasn’t saying that I thought anyone should, or would do them.
Silent jab at the community? Eh, not really, more like a jab at anyone foolish enough to think it’s a simple thing to change an entire group of people’s fundamental ideology without incurring repercussions.
I can see how what I wrote could be taken as negative though, if you ignore the second option I gave, and are prone to rash emotional based decisions. For that reason, I didn’t un-flag it.
Please keep the thread on topic. We don’t need a meta-conversation about flagging posts - though, frankly, I think the flagged posts are… odd, to say the least. I didn’t see anything worthy of flagging in either of them, though I suppose the second one being off-topic would be reason enough to flag it…
anyway, back to the topic at hand - which is going in circles at this point until it receives a definitive answer, which could be soon™ (?)
Idk I think an official roblox builder badge or whatever its called would be good enough
After fully reading approximately 139 replies to this original post, I’d like to swing back to the main question: Should members of the Developer Forums receive a badge showing that they’re actually members of this community and not a scammer or something along those lines.
First off, the argument can be made that developers do most certainly use their membership to this forum as a way to show that they’re a well-known Roblox developer, and that they can be trusted. This is not the case whatsoever! Last time I checked, which was fairly recently, to gain access to this forum all you have to do is show you development capabilities which doesn’t prove a thing as to whether you’re a trustworthy person or if you should be trusted to make trades that are not facilitated by the Roblox systems. All the person reviewing your application knows about you is whether you’re a decent developer or not (from the work you show), your moderation history, and a handful of things about you that are written in the application itself; from this there’s no way for them to deem you a “trustworthy and known member of the community”. All a badge would do is allow for those with malicious intent who also happen to have been accepted into the Developer Forums a lift up from those others, because as was stated: outsiders have absolutely no transparency with what happens on most of these forums allowing them to perceive members how they may. This could cause them to believe that members of this community are fully vetted by a staff member and shows how amazingly reliable they are, mainly because they have absolutely no information to base their opinion off of except that they have access to something that makes them important… and they don’t.
Moving on, the developer forums most certainly can be used as a social status booster. It’s similar to the fact that there’s an endorsed model maker badge (which is essentially obsolete at this point I must add). This shows that a player has made models which were endorsed by Roblox and are high quality models, showing that the player who made them and has the badge is a high quality developer who has been recognized as such by Roblox; not showing a status of power or special administrative ability at all.
I couldn’t agree with this more. As long as members of this community know you exist and you know that you’re clearly a good enough developer to be here, what else matters? Why do you require a badge to show that you got into a club of developers who also filled out a long application to gain membership to this forum. Having access to this forum doesn’t mean that you’re some god-tier developer (some of you might be ) but it shows that your work is modest enough to be invited to a club where you can ask questions and improve your work as a developer.
Authority
On the positive side of this, developers will be seen as role models for a younger audience (who is clearly marketed to by Roblox). This type of aspiration to be good enough to become a member of the forums could be strategically good to entice a younger audience to work hard and become decent or even amazing developers and create a future for themselves on the platform. Take ten year old David for example. He’s playing Roblox one day, and he comes across Jailbreak by the team at Badimo. David enjoys the game so much that he decides he wants to go on and make his own cool game based on Jailbreak (he’s not too creative). David goes to badcc’s profile and finds a badge showing that he’s a member of the Roblox Developer Forums. He proceeds to find out that the forums here are an actual place and searches here in the /development-help forum to get ideas. He comes across someone mention the Roblox Wiki and he opens it up to find all these scripting tutorials! David spends his free time learning to script and becomes the best scripter on Roblox; David then applies to become a member of the developer forums to see how his work measures up against others.
This type of things could be a major plus side of a badge because just from finding the badge on someone’s profile, it could inspire someone who wanted to be a developer to take the step and put the work in.
On the negative side, a semi-decent developer named Jimmy could apply for the developer forums and manage to get in (not that this is a bad thing in most situations). Jimmy only wanted to become a member so that he would get the badge and be able to brag to his friends about it. Jimmy really didn’t want to become a better developer but more wanted access for the social status that comes with it. Jimmy became a developer in February but never opened the forums again, but he managed to use his social status on the forums to scam John, a nine year old kid who saved his chore allowance to buy enough Robux to get a sparkle time fedora. Jimmy entices John with his developer forums badge explaining that only famous developers get that badge and have access to this forum. He somehow smokes John enough that he trusts him, and gives him the sparkle time fedora in return for something he’ll never see. This leads to major distrust from John of all members of the Developer Forum because he saw Jimmy as a trustworthy guy because he has that badge and has access to the forums. For some reason, outside of this forum, members have a high social status just for having access.
If members end up getting a badge, it needs to be made more public that members of these forums aren’t special but just normal developers. I personally feel that a badge could stop people from trying to use the claim of being members of the forums when they’re really not to show off to people and gain trust from other users. A badge could make the devforums more popular but there will always be those people who apply just to receive the badge.
From what I see, impersonation of RBXDev members isn’t that widespread especially now that there’s a little bit of a higher level of transparency for non-members of the forum. If you are really concerned about impersonation there’s always the Roblox Developer Forum Group, which anyone who is a member of these forums has access to join.
Off topic but I saw this while I was writing this. The only issue with this is that you have to remember that not all developers are successful. And on top of that, sadly enough there will be those people who use a bot to increase their place visit counter just to gain access to those areas.
In general I also saw a lot about how we should open the forums to a broader group of people. I feel like these forums should remain closed to a smaller group (not that the amount of members is currently small but it’s small compared to the Roblox userbase). Since the developer forums are so restrictive in who can access, post, and interact with threads on this forum it has much higher expectations on the quality of posts.
Realistically I think this is the most logical and most likely to happen. It’s hard to ask Roblox to add a badge for members of this community because of how much lashback and negativity they’ll get from non-members. A simple link that goes with the twitter one and such would solve a lot of problems and will show that you’re in the devforums without you having a major item on your profile which could give differing views on your level of authority. Badges more have the intention of giving a level of recognition to players who earn an achievement such as inviting new players, bloxing people to death, and having people play your game.
This is true to an extent. If you think about it, not everyone clicks on the badge to view more information about it because they’re able to read the name of it right there on page without having to open a new one.
As Lilly said early on, there would be some people who would go around and act like because they have the RBXDev badge that they’re invincible to everything. Outside of the forums everyone thinks that members of this community are very important but the truth is we’re just a bunch of developers who are on a platform where we can effectively communicate.
Overall I think this is the biggest problem with having members of the forums receiving a badge for it, but I also understand the argument that people who aren’t members of the forums trying to abuse the fact that members don’t stand out from other players on the website.
Sorry for the block of text and bumping this post after a long 11 months
9354 characters/1648 words
I do see your point, but there are quite a lot of members in RBXDev and I don’t think it is that big of an achievement.
I do agree on this because some people are looking for skilled developers, so if they find someone with said badge it would be easy to find a real developer.
Solution on that about scams:
There is an unofficial Devforum group that only accepts Devforum members.
The suggestion for devforum badges is now moot because of how much the forum has grown since this thread was created. Previously it was much more personal, but now anyone can become a member. Skill is no longer a requirement for the devforum, and there’s no guarantee that the users we’re accepting are sincere – we don’t have nearly enough information when accepting members at this scale.
The solution on too many getting accepted would be setting more requirements etc. And if I’m not too wrong, only 100 does get accepted each month. And possibly removing inactive Devforum members. Edit: Only give the badge to members with the trust level “member”, and not to the members with “upcoming developer” trust level.