Unfortunately posts like these aren’t just crap posts, they are genuine. It’s because we’ve gone from a place for experienced or knowledgeable but growing developers to communicate to a place where anyone can say anything.
Another example would be when I asked about mobile game support and got a bunch of kids arguing when nearly nobody had actually launched a game on mobile and was pretty much just speculating.
Or the time someone claimed that Roblox does not utilize the GPU at all.
I’ve replied to this thread a lot lately so I think I’ll give it a break but the list goes on and on and it’s legitimately distressing since it makes Roblox less of a professional looking platform and makes it more difficult for me to ask things like “how do I implement quaternions in this case” without someone telling me that quarters are for gumball machines.
Final thing is that I want to see people booted off or separated into lower tier categories. I hope I don’t fit into that unfortunately since I never got promoted even though I’m a genuine but small developer, but anything to make the forum better. I just want to ask good questions or post cool content without people spamming it.
Hopefully if I make a PSA in the development category I won’t get flagged despite the fact that crap posts never get flagged lol.
I once nearly got into an argument on here with someone who claimed that using copyrighted characters, in their case The Simpsons, wouldn’t be a breach of copyright or could get you in trouble. They said that characters couldn’t be copyrighted and “not like a large company like them will care what happens on Roblox”. Regardless of posting information and evidence.
Needless to say, the skill and knowledge barrier has dropped a lot since the forums went public completely. Hopefully these ideas will fix the issue, but I doubt much will change if I’m being honest.
Don’t even get me started on the bad legal advice section. Anything from “you don’t own the copyright to your game’s IP” to “I have a constitutional right to make money off of pokémon’s intellectual property without their permission!!!111”.
I hope this thread gets the attention of developer relations. Keep posting and maybe change will happen. We will see.
I also loved it when people told me on here that Roblox doesn’t run on the GPU, and I am an idiot to believe that it does since their phone apparently didn’t have a GPU. (It does, in-fact, have a GPU.)
Oh God I remember the discussion that someone started about how “regulars live to suppress members” because one regular said there that Roblox should crack down more on misinformation like this lol
There could be other verification methods that could be used alongside the ones that you listed such as:
The users Roblox account has a verified phone number since only 13+ accounts can add a phone number and you cannot use the same phone number on multiple Roblox accounts. (this could also help prevent people from making alt accounts for the sole purpose of breaking the rules so that their main account does not get banned)
If a user tries to join the DevForum on a <13 account and then make a new 13+ account that is verified with the same email address as the <13 account then they will not be able to join the forum.
Requiring a users Roblox account to be a specific number of days old before being allowed to join the DevForum.
Recently, I have noticed an increasing amount of spam on the DevForum coming from compromised Roblox accounts so there are some other things that could be added to prevent this from happening:
Disabling posting abilities on the DevForum for a user that has had their account closed as a compromised account.
Requiring all users of the forum to have 2-step verification and an Account PIN enabled on their Roblox accounts
Recommending users to make sure that their passwords cannot be easily guessed at the time of joining.
This is a serious problem and I know many users (I am not naming anyone) that do this kind of stuff on a regular basis and I personally find it really annoying and unprofessional. There are many things that could be done to prevent all the nonsense posts and users posting just for the sake of it:
Giving harsher punishments to users that do this stuff (possibly suspension for a couple hours or a few days)
Making enough of these posts in a specific timeframe could result in the user making these posts receiving a strike or maybe have a half strike or something.
Having a trust level in between member and regular that has the same permissions that member currently has right now and member could have some privileges removed such as the ability to reply to bug reports and create topics in #development-discussion but the new trust level in-between member and regular would have these permissions (This might not be possible due to Discourse limitations)
Giving harsher punishments to users that quote and/or reply to posts after they have been hidden by flags. (I came across this topic on the Discourse Meta where some other forum owners were also mentioning that users will quote and reply to posts after they are hidden)
Rules that prohibit “Rate my creation” or “How much should I sell this asset for?” topics should be better enforced and this kind of stuff should be looked for when topics are flagged as either “spam” or “something else” in #help-and-feedback:cool-creations.
There should be rules that posting prohibit donation games and other games that are blatant “cash grabs” in #help-and-feedback:cool-creations with harsh but reasonable and fair punishments such as loss of posting privileges for a few days or something.
Ways to prevent/discourage users from trying to bypass/ bypassing the minimum character requirement such as harsher punishments for doing so. Users should be warned for the first and maybe the second offense but any offenses after that should result in punishments such as a loss of posting privileges. Posts bypassing this requirement should be deleted or moved to an “off-topic replies” topic if they are flagged as spam. It gets really annoying seeing people post stuff like this:
More punishments that are harsher than feedback but not as harsh as a suspension/strike such as loss of posting privileges or suspensions for under 24 hours that could be used for minor rule violations of rules that are broken very frequently such as bypassing the character requirement. There could possibly be a system like warnings on your Roblox account where it logs you out and tells you what you did wrong and reminds you to review the rules and acknowledge that you have read and agree to the rules before being able to log back in.
People from overseas and in different time zones should be hired to moderate the forum “after hours” and on weekends so that the forum is being moderated 24/7
On second thought, I think that we should just have community members voluntarily moderate the forum and not hire any additional moderators. Since moderator is a big responsibility, only some members that are able to prove that they can be trusted and responsible enough to be a moderator. Also any member that volunteers to help moderate the forum should be trained and educated on how to deal with specific situations such as a user bumping old topics and posting NSFW images.
Most of the spam and nonsense posts occur on the weekends or during hours that the moderators are not working or asleep. While some of this nonsense occurs while the moderators are online, the moderators usually take action on it really quickly and it usually continues for much longer when the moderators are offline. Trustworthy and responsible community members could also voluntarily help moderate the forum during the hours that the moderators are offline.
Update 6/20/2021:
I have linked my reply to another topic regarding some of the common issues in #development-discussion in this post where I explained some of the issues with DD and the contents of it that really need to be addressed as well as some ways that I think could be used to address some of these issues.
I honestly don’t even think hiring people is necessary. There are enough active and mature developers that want to see the devforum returned to its previous usefulness that you could probably get enough volunteers for 24/7 coverage.
I mean there were many different programs for forum members that helped with operating the forum (Post Approval) but were taken down by Roblox. I do get why as some people saw this as endorsement but I personally believe that they should bring this back but make it anonymous (just like how they are doing it with @Bug-Support)
I blurred the expletive on the last example but you get the point, people are not using the DevForum as a development resource, they are using it as social media.
Another part of the problem that isn’t really talked about is the mindset of certain people towards others on the forum. I’m not going to tap into the mindset of a few regulars since this isn’t the topic here but there is, quite frankly, a huge number of members that feel entitled to access everything on the forum because they simply exist.
That being said, they post a lot of off-topic discussions even if they stay up for 5 minutes just because they want to and they even acknowledge that this is against the forum rules. The moderation doesn’t do anything with it other than just archive the posts and move on. I do understand that they’re more than likely overworked by the amount of users that use the forum and report posts every day but this was actually solved by volunteer community members that actually shared the burden of moderation with roblox staff.
Personally I would’ve loved to see something like this return but in an annonymized way just like they’re doing with the @Bug-Support group. If not, I would’ve totally like to see them deliver harsher punishments to users who do actually express the fact that they know they’re breaking the rules. This has become a real issue that Roblox seems to choose to ignore which this shouldn’t be the case.
This is why alternatives pop up all the time with users trying to replace the devforum with something else which they usually end up being completely closed off to the public or raided and ruined by users who exploit the fact that the admins don’t have enough foresight to predict malicious attacks.
Judging by the fact you don’t even have his updated profile picture, I think it’s clear you took this off a certain Twitter account dedicated to smearing people rather than actually finding it yourself and using it for well-intentioned criticism.
This is a problem. I beilive that there are a lot of people (mainly members but some regulars too) who forget that forum access is a priveldge, not a right. I think this thread should be a wake-up call to rulebreakers that sometime in the future this is not going to be tolerated anymore. The forum could be taken away for all we know. Don’t demand that you can access certain categories or ranks; be happy you can get membership in the first place.
I think this reply really sums up the entitled-ness of certain users of the forum. You cannot make demands, be happy the forum even exists!
100% disrespectful and I hope this user is removed from the forums for being so demanding. That is not how you deal with a situation. This user also personally attacked me in the devforum discord server afterwards, calling me a snitch, etc. These users truly do not think there is anything wrong with this. This needs to be addressed.
I feel as if we just need the roblox forums back in some capacity (obviously better, and well moderated), since a majority of topics (of any quality) will just funnel here or to kid-unsafe platforms like discord, and will cause more and more people to show up, since google favors devforum answers in its searches for questions related to roblox studio. If the forums existed, bad topics would be funneled to the forums rather then a more stringent/higher quality location like here. Overall these are some good suggestions
Most of the posts on Development Discussion bring absolutely nothing of value to the table. Posts are endless variations of basic questions like “how to be good at developing” or “where do I go to learn how to develop” or “what is your favorite time of day to develop/what is your favorite music to listen to while developing/what does your desk and computer setup look like for developing”.
And what sucks is, not all of these topics are awful, but they are being repeated endlessly (and the ones that do stick around, stick for months as so many new developers just keep flooding the posts with more and more useless replies that barely anybody reads to begin with).
Also, there needs to be actual qualifications for when someone is “good enough of a developer to be worthy of devforum membership”. You may say “but but gatekeeping, but we need to welcome new developers to the community!!!” …yeah, honestly I do not care about that initiative at all anymore, seeing how terrible the devforum has become in an effort to be inclusive to complete newbies.
Going back to the topics I mentioned earlier, they aren’t inherently bad discussions, which is why devrel staff are too afraid to take action against them. But, the problem is, while hearing about the desk and computer setup of highly experienced developers who have been in the game for 10 years can be very interesting and lead to constructive discussions about different modeling and code editing programs, different hardware configurations to best utilize roblox, good practices for organizing your daily developer routines, etc, what you instead get is mindless blabber from people claiming to be “developers” who joined roblox 4 months ago and opened studio a few weeks ago.
The problem is no longer whether someone has good intent and is trying to follow the rules, or if someone is malicious and trying to cause a disturbance. The problem is people of low skill level have collectively plummeted the quality of discussions across the devforum. Devrel should have never opened the floodgates to absolutely everyone; if someone wants to get started with development, they will have a much better resource in being able to read high quality discussions between experienced developers, rather than reading AND writing amongst thousands of completely clueless buffoons.
How do you think they should verify age? How should they verify your real name? I absolutely do not trust roblox with my ID and I’m not going to have my real name on the internet with how rare it is.
People are forgetting it’s not our job to come up with a solution. This topic outlines a problem, one I agree with. I don’t use the forum because finding relevant content is extremely hard given the noise of non-development junk to useful content.
Some potential solutions are mentioned in the topic, but ultimately it’s the responsibility of product teams/DET to come up with a solution to resolve the problem.
Staff teams have the tools to take those suggestions and come up with something that will actually work, based on their internal metrics etc.
stop nitpicking the suggestions. they’re helpful and start discussions internally.
