Stricter posting requirements

Forum Help Forum Features
#1

The Problem

As a Roblox developer and user of the Developer Forum, it is currently too hard to find good quality topics, especially in DD. Many people ask the most basic/frequently asked questions over there and it’s starting to become increasingly more annoying. Some examples include “Sponsors vs. Ads”, “I got warned for x”, “I got scammed”, and low-effort topics written in one sentence, i.e. “What’s your best creation?”.

The categories are slowly starting to lose purpose because of this. You can’t find good discussions to participate in. This isn’t just annoying for us though. People who create such topics become confused and/or frustrated because they either get broad answers or their topics go unanswered completely.

Solutions

Here are some things I think could make a difference:

Stricter requirements to post

Stricter/more specific requirements to post – increased character or even a word requirement (also requested here and here). The current 3x10 (darn filter) character requirement is fine for replies, but should be increased for topics. This is a made-up rule I personally follow - topics should always have more thought put into them than replies. Not writing one sentence. But at least 3 or 4. They could also enforce the requirements listed in the templates, they need to be updated anyway. There are many more I’d like to list here but similar feature requests already exist – support them instead.

Stricter user requirements

Stricter user requirements – ok. Before you leave, this is not a rant about the removal of post approval. Read on. As we’ve all probably seen, the current automatic promotions to the member role isn’t really working. You can just spend some time using the forum and BOOM! You can now post in the majority of categories. If they allowed you to slowly unlock the different categories over time, or made some sort of system which could determine how many correct and incorrect posts you’ve made. For example, you would have access to help and feedback. You make a topic, a few people reply, and you have “points” to level up. But if you made a topic and it gets closed, your chance of getting access to more categories decreases. To keep it short, they should add another member rank, but with a few less privileges.

Better introduction

A more personalized intro to the forum than the current Discobot. It tells you how to bookmark posts, like them, create them, and how to flag them but it doesn’t tell you what those bad posts are. I made a reply proposing something similar, you can read it for more details (and that topic is relevant as well).

Cool down

A cool down between topic creation. This is more of a spam-prevention feature, but could come in handy sometimes. Nothing directed at the individual who trashed the forum earlier today - but people sometimes “hunt” for likes and thirst for attention by creating simple topics within a small timeframe. Introducing a cool down could help with this, making sure no one creates more topics than they need to. They could include something like auto-warn or temporarily disable posting for that user for a while. If you create too many topics within ten minutes, you would have to wait to post. The topic could also be unlisted by default and only appear on top after some time. It could backfire as well, though, it would require proper implementation to work effectively.

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my experience using the forum because I would be able to find more high quality topics to browse and contribute to. Seeing the same “discussion” topics over and over again is tiring and something should be done about it.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to share your opinions below, I myself am not sure on how some of these should be implemented in order for them not to backfire easily.

14 Likes
#2

I also believe that a way to reduce the number of duplicate topics would be to stop a user from creating a topic if it is similar to too many others. This should (dont hold me to this, i have no idea how it actually works) in theory be easy to do as the ‘Your topic is similar to…’ box is already a thing when you create a topic.

3 Likes
#3

It could, but also depends on what or who would decide whether or not a topic is similar. The way the “Your topic is similar to…” box works (I’m guessing) is by taking the title, tags, and body of your topic and basically listing all the topics that would appear if inputted to the search bar. The last time I was creating a topic in building support asking about the best way to use meshes, the box gave results containing similar words as mine (mesh, performance, texture, etc.) but none of them contained the answer i was looking for.

Your solution could work if the system was reliable, but preventing people from posting entirely because they use similar terms is a little too overboard. The only way it would work well is if it was reviewed by a real person but chances are it would end up like post approval.

5 Likes
#4

There’s that issue yes,
another solution would be their revamp of post approval which was talked about but never actually happened.

2 Likes
#5

Yeah, but seeing that it won’t happen anytime soon, they should at least introduce in-between changes that could fix the current system. I hope they haven’t given up on the idea of a new system though!

1 Like
#6

I did talk about an increased word count in my feature request and I completely agree with this. Seeing low effort posts in DD just wants me to mute the channel entirely. It’s pretty much become #lounge. Either enforce some added rules or lock it to Regulars.

1 Like
#7

I would certainly agree if the regular role was obtainable at this time. It would normally be a very good idea - only those who are trusted and well-behaved are regulars. But just because it isn’t, they had to make a decision. Either keep it clean and available only to regulars and put bigger pressure on themselves by making members crave the regular role even more, or open for everyone and maintain reasonable privileges for members. I would choose the second option being them, but some even speculate that the new PA will never happen. It would pretty much explain the reasoning behind all of this.

1 Like
#8

Yes, but most of the time, my box shows completely irrelevant posts, and I end up disregarding it.

1 Like
#9

I don’t pay that much attention to it, but I don’t find that hard to believe given how a certain other bot :unamused: takes offense to and bans assets for having a few pixels out of place.

In that case yeah, maybe using that isn’t a good idea.
They’ll come up with something, I hope-

1 Like