Hey all,
Before I dive into it, I wanted to thank the OP for providing a place for so many people to provide their insight and thoughts into the current state of the DevForum. We really appreciate it when people make their voices heard, so thank you, thank you, thank you!
I’ve read every comment posted so far, and can appreciate the general sentiment - more experienced Creators are not finding the DevForum as helpful as they’d like it to be. It’s an interesting problem to solve because at Roblox accessibility is super important. The ease at which our players can become creators is uniquely fantastic, and one of the big reasons I enjoy working on this platform so much.
As such, we want the DevForum to be able to accommodate Creators just starting out, Creators with decades of experience (either within Roblox, or elsewhere), and everyone in between. Increasing access restrictions by looking at age or success would therefore only replace one problem with many others, and does not feel true to Roblox’s open-platform vision.
The issues highlighted in this thread have definitely been exacerbated by the last 24 months of explosive growth that Roblox has had, which of course extends to the Creator community as well.
This has put pressure on the processes we have in place, the fantastic DevRel teams who moderate the content being posted, and the DevForum as a technical product itself. I hope that you’ll be happy to know that we’ve been thinking a lot about how the DevForum is useful for all of our diverse community, as more and more users join.
We’re in the research stages of this project, and it’s quite a large undertaking, so we want to take the time and make sure the solution we eventually bring out is robust, and will work very well not just at the current community size, but also scale alongside Roblox’s growth for years into the future.
To shine a quick light on my personal viewpoint right now (and as afore-mentioned ‘research stage’, please don’t take this view as any concrete action plan) - this fundamentally isn’t about ‘poor quality’ content, as any major platform will have that. Instead, it’s that all content is shown to users in equal measure, irrespective of whether it’s what the user is looking for or not. By fixing the discovery of content, we can make sure that the DevForum continues to be open, but experienced Creators, who may want to interact primarily only with other experienced Creators, can do so within the same space. This requires a solution that is a lot more fundamental to the forum as a product, rather than just adding some new mechanism on top.
We’re still at a stage where we’re not comfortable sharing details, or any specific plans of action. But we hear your concerns, agree with the sentiment and are already planning on pushing many resources into creating a great solution that works for everyone now, and everyone in the future.
Thanks