I agree with this but members of a forum making a suggestion for DET to read and maybe push to the website could be beneficial for them, since now that there is an idea proposed by somebody on the forums that they maybe could have took longer to think of, and that idea is getting supported heavily (basing off the hearts on the thread), they could take it into consideration faster and put out an update.
As someone whoâs been here almost as long as OP has and many others, seen this place since it was just RbxDev and watched as the literal flood gates were let open, I agree with almost all of this.
The only thing I am iffy on is with verifying age or rather the method used to verify. I am well over the age of 18 but, I do not want my identification stored somewhere that I do not have access to. However, I would consider it just to make discussions far better to read and far less toxic in general.
The devforum has become, despite what people say, almost as some sort of elite status where the users who believe in this odd ideology are the ones evidently ruining posts and/or creating threads with an apparent lack of maturity. The discussions held on this forum are no longer helpful but, have become extremely toxic, immature and pointless. People are giving legal advice over concepts that they do no understand (IP, copyright, etc). People are issuing replies that hold zero value or merit. Creating topics filled with redundancies.
As an old person (both in age and in accumulative time spent here), it becomes almost pathetic to contribute to any meaningful conversation when the quality of the forums is seemingly poor. Not all posts and/or threads are bad, some are great but, the worse seems to make up the majority. This became apparent when the entry to the devforums was made all-inclusive.
I think that everyone should be able to read the devforum because, itâs still used as a resource but, I think who can post and contribute should be limited to those who possess the quality to do so.
A lot of these posts above point to volunteer moderation as some sort of solution. None of us are getting paid therefore, the solution shouldnât be created nor should be executed by us. There are people who work on this forum and are paid a salary or hourly to sustain the forum, to listen to feedback and to make changes. Those people are the ones who should be coming up with a solution. This post is a good stepping stone to bring serious issues into light. Hopefully, this will be taken seriously and acted upon.
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Iâm down for anything that will stop the âWhat makes you motivated?â threads and hypothetical scenarios that arenât worth anyoneâs time or thinking power that I see every freaking week in #development-discussion.
To this day, I still think this hack week project wouldâve been the perfect alternative for non-developers. Iâve been silently praying for years that this will become an actual feature.
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Things have gotten so out of hand that itâs become a meme of its own. Thatâs just evidence to the problem at hand. I agree with OP here.
Weâre starting to see the late issues of the old forum leaking into here.
I envy the Unity forums. Just look at their Scripting category. Every topic there is meaningful and helpful for everyone.
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Exactly. And thatâs the problem. If roblox wants these posts to be allowed then at least section off another category and rank on the forum for that sort of stuff. Like I keep saying there 0 point to most of the posts. Itâs just a waste of electricity.
Indeed. Some people are offended at the idea that very low skill level development shouldnât be what the devforum is, but truth be told that doesnât matter.
I am 100% not calling anyone out and as I previously stated in other posts here where we were showing examples, I made that clear aswell.
None of the accounts are dedicated to smearing people (at least not the main ones I follow). I copied the image I found there because it shows a good example of what a bad post is. Of course there are times when one screenshot alone is not enough context to make a fair judgement. Just because the OP later corrected himself which I did not notice does not mean that I intended to âsmearâ them.
Please do not baselessly accuse others of smearing people just for showing examples of possible unnecessary devforum posts.
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I completely agree with OP on all of this. Roblox seriously needs to do something about the Devforums, since the quality of posts is slowly going down.
I see more and more twitter accounts every day posting âDevforum memesâ with pictures of discussion threads from #development-discussion, which shouldnât be a thing to such an extent.
While I am 18-, I totally agree with most of your statements encouraging the promotion of higher-aged developers. A lot of the threads posted are usually along the lines of âhow do I make a gamepassâ, etc⌠which can be easily solved by going to the Devhub or the Roblox wiki.
The developer forum should be an open place for everyone to discuss development, however there should be moderation and quality control in-place for users who want to post.
But in some countries it is against the law to take info from 18- so I donât really see how this is done. Also I imagine alot of people donât want their personal info there secure or not.
although 13+ users can still take it seriously, some do! (As a 13 year old user myself 
), I find the Devforum as a great resource, you discover so many new things! All I think is that they just need to find a better way to verify age and intent!
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I think that tests and quizzes on certain topics to prove that you are qualified to provide help to said topic(s), would make much sense.
Iâve seen more then a couple posts of people that (in my mind) are probably unqualified to provide answers/solutions.
Last thing, maybe members can actually earn their place instead of just joining and being able to post and such
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Itâs fine to use those images to give an example, but at least blur the names out. I donât particularly mind you using that image, but that might not be the case for someone else.
Regardless, we should get back on topic.
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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!
Iâve read every comment posted so far, and can appreciate the general sentiment - more experienced Creators are not finding the DevForum as helpful as theyâd like it to be. Itâs 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 Robloxâs 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 youâll be happy to know that weâve been thinking a lot about how the DevForum is useful for all of our diverse community, as more and more users join.
Weâre in the research stages of this project, and itâs 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 Robloxâs growth for years into the future.
To shine a quick light on my personal viewpoint right now (and as afore-mentioned âresearch stageâ, please donât take this view as any concrete action plan) - this fundamentally isnât about âpoor qualityâ content, as any major platform will have that. Instead, itâs that all content is shown to users in equal measure, irrespective of whether itâs 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.
Weâre still at a stage where weâre 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
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Im super late to the party but, I like to remain anonymous where possible, so no thank you.
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Yes. I have not been on Studio in a while because I have nothing to do at the moment (the person I work for is out sick) and I have been working on an app to help new developers. I would not like this affecting my DevForum account.
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You really arenât wrong, the Devforum has helped me with many things both GFX and scripting, but I feel like it could still be better. For example, I saw someoneâs post say something about loving a girl on their development team. I wonât go further into that, but I think you already know what I mean. Also, Roblox isnât too trustworthy with personal information as Admin accounts are getting hacked here and there and I donât want the hacker to get access to all my personal information. Keyword: personal.
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Going to mark solution to the topic to make sure the staff response is easily discoverable (even though the feature request is still open) since there are already 100+ replies.
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Personally I donât think that this is a discoverability issue but rather the fact that either donât know or choose to ignore the fact that post they create are already there and DET not doing enough to curb the entitlement. I understand that you guys are overworked but essentially putting blame on the search feature that works really well isnât going to take the forum far. I do honestly believe that you guys need help from the community in a way that isnât just constantly flagging down post. I do hope that program such as the Editor program or Post Approval come back because I feel like one of those days, the DET will reach itâs breaking point beyond return where there will be simply too many members for a small team like yours to moderate.
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Hey! Thanks for your thoughts.
To be clear - when I talk about discoverability, Iâm not actually referring to the search bar. Right now, content is purely laid out in the time it was posted - whether weâre talking about the order of thread comments, or the order of threads in a section. This means that itâs a lot harder to discover the content more experienced developers want, because the contentâs discoverability is purely time-based, and not based on âqualityâ (I use that word with caution, but hopefully you catch my drift). This means that when users browse the forum, or individual threads, they have to wade through every single piece of content (ordered by time) rather than being able to quickly get all the most useful stuff at the top.
Iâm trying to speak about this in abstract terms, because weâre still researching the best solutions for this - but this thread is a great resource for us to inform decision making.
I totally agree with you that more can be done around educating users on not posting duplicate content, and on the fact that a centralized moderation team is not as easily scalable in size as our creator community. As such, I personally expect us to end up leaning more on the community for helping deem âqualityâ content.
I hope this unpacks my current mode of thinking a bit better - please raise any other concerns or thoughts around this as well! The more we have, the better our internal discussions can be.
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Iâm still not sure thatâs the real issue at hand here; even sorted by quality isnât the solution to the problems that are facing here. The problem is many posts may be low quality yet may artificially seem as they are high quality due to certain factors such as likes, views, replies, length, etc. (I donât know what other criteria could be used here).
Feel free to send me a DM, Iâd be happy to share examples of what I mean privately.
The problem with this is DET/DevRel has seemingly done the opposite of what will help the forum so far, when sages/editors were deprecated, that just took away a group of users who could help clean out these bad posts, and this is no more.
I believe the answer lies in having more, anonymous users to help deal with non-moderation details such as moving threads and changing titles.
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Will there be actual engineering man hours into modifying the Discourse engine or providing an alternative forum solution entirely? There are many different ways to remedy the various problems the forum faces, but most, if not all of them require some level of re-engineering at a web development level, not just changes in management and organization.
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I think in the near future, most of Roblox Dev related recruiting will be done through the new hiring and resume searching platform that Roblox has been working on. I canât remember its name off the top of my head, but I believe this was featured in either RDC or a hack week or something along those lines. Essentially, you can put up your portfolio, categorize yourself based on your skills and specialties, list prices and whatnot; then, when someone is hiring, they can easily search and sort through this database.
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