Roblox simply can’t make the bug reports open for everyone, otherwise you’ll have kids submitting bug reports for small or non existent issues that slows down how fast engineers can fix bugs as they have to swim through the piles of crap to get to the actual issues.
At the same time, the reason bug-support takes a while is because its simply not possible to have enough people going through bug reports to keep the system scalable. This is why post approval was shutdown in the first place.
If Roblox makes promoting automatic, then they run the risk of letting in people who shouldn’t have the role and those who try to game the system. (Keep in mind, teams are “pinged” every time a bug is reported.)
As of now there is no real good solution here, Roblox seems to be slowly promoting certain users who they deem worthy, so for now all you can really do is wait. You could also contact a friend who has regular and get them to post for you.
These are not good reasons to keep bug reports locked down long-term. Eventually, they will be opened up and anybody can post issues. They just need to build systems to let them cluster similar reports together easily and prioritize based on impact to the platform (e.g. if a top game dev reports something, that should have higher priority than if a newcomer reports something, or based on the estimated user/player impact)
Basically the limiting factor here is engineering time needed to build good solutions that scale without as much human resources sifting through issues up-front.
Of course, as I said there is no real good solution right now.
Fair, but you then run into the issue of smaller developers issues being possibly ignored over larger developers, when brings us back to square 1 where we are now. How would you keep people from “game-ifying” the system (for lack of a better word), who would decide which bug reports are more of a pressing issue?
There are more “smaller developers” (I hate this term, can we think of something better) than top devs so presumably they can outnumber the top dev’s voting power if they vote on similar issues.
Roblox can also have different teams working on bugs/features that affect different parts of the dev funnel (e.g. maybe one team focuses specifically on bugs/features plaguing upcoming developers). If they have systems for prioritizing differently per kind of developer, they can start doing things like this.
To clarify, it seems that only one person at bug-support regularly views bug reports, there is definently some improving that can happen there, but that’s besides the point.
Thanks for all the feedback on various issues regarding the bug reporting workflow. We’re very aware of these issues and understand that the current situation prevents you from effectively providing us with feedback.
We’re going to be shifting more internal resources towards prioritizing creator feedback workflows (not just adding patches here and there as has been the case since ~Sep 2020). I will try to be as transparent as possible about things we are planning to roll out as we finish planning and things become more clear, and get feedback from the community early on where appropriate.
Many thanks for continuing to push on these issues and we really appreciate your patience!
Thank you for the reply @Hooksmith. I truly appreciate it. However, I have one question regarding bug reporting workflow. What are the thoughts of the Roblox Forum team to allow players to be able to create topic’s or respond on the #bug-reports? Is this is a massive switch of allowing more expression on the forum?
Thank you for your time and have a wonderful rest of your day!
Thank you for acknowledging the need to allowing members to communicate on the #bug-reports. While I understand the complexities of software development and it being hard to change certain features, it has been nine months since this issue was raised. The extended delay has caused frustration among users, including myself. I appreciate the work you have done thus far and have confidence in your team’s abilities. I just want to know has there been progress to bring this to members.
Thank you for your attention and have a great rest of your day.
We have done a lot of improvements to the bug reporting back-end and triaging process over the last few months. In the next quarter we are going to start looking into how we can change the access requirements for bug reports to cause less friction, as well as starting to improve the tools our internal folks use to triage bugs to help increase throughput, but I can’t share any more concrete timelines around the access requirement problem at this time.
After spending a lot of time and effort internally to scale up how we handle bugs across Roblox’s product engineering teams, we finally have a solution available here: The Big Bug Reporting Update
Everybody here in the current topic that made a post or Liked one of the posts (as of Mar 19) has had their join request accepted if they submitted one. I’m marking this as the solution of the topic for that reason.
For everybody else that participates here later than this reply, please follow the instructions in the linked announcement above on how to get your join request in. We are slowly accepting people from the backlog to make sure we don’t overwhelm internal teams, but it is our goal to clear out the backlog. It will take us some time before we’re caught up with requests so appreciate your patience here.
Thanks again for posting about this and for your patience as we worked this out!
