Currently the “Discussions” category of the DevForums is limited to Regular trust levels and above. In my opinion, this limits the ability for “Members” to participate in the overall community of Roblox developers as we are constrained to certain channels. The issue with this is that it makes it even harder for “Members” to progress into the Regular trust level.
As of right now, the process of getting promoted to Regular seems to be an automated process. However, the issue with this is that some developers have been trying for months and have still not been able to get promoted. I think as a DevForum community member, it should be possible for all trust levels to have the opportunity to be able to participate in most if not all places of the DevForum.
I understand the security concerns some people might have in allowing this. To counter this (I don’t quite know if this has been implemented before but it doesn’t seem to be an option right now), I suggest it is also made so that low trust levels such as Members are able to post through the approval of higher trust levels such as Post Approvals. Either way, I think this could help Members participate in the community while in their state of being “Members” and not be forced to stay in Help categories.
Post Approval was recently removed from Discussion and will not be returned for the time being - see here.
Further, the primary purpose of Regular is to identify users who know how to use important categories such as Platform Feedback and allow them to use those categories without handholding. The most important category in this respect is in fact Platform Feedback, so if you’re not utilizing that category, there is almost no reason for you to be a Regular.
Only Regulars being able to post in Discussion is just an unfortunate side effect; the majority of Members have shown they cannot use Discussion appropriately, Post Approval has too much work to do for more important categories to handle requests for Discussion that mostly get denied anyway, and we are not willing to sacrifice the quality of the Discussion category by opening it to everyone without Post Approval.
You’ve made good points. However, I think that it’s unjust to force developers who haven’t generally been able to find a problems with the platform to be “Members”. I say this because in reality if a developer cannot find issues with the engine (a bug) and doesn’t have anything they generally dislike about the engine (suggestions), then I think this leads to that developer having to force themselves to make up an issue or an fake suggestions in order to participate in other topics. I personally am always looking for things to improve on the engine and will not post anything until I do find a bug or find something I genuinely dislike or believe can be improved upon.
Generally I’d like to believe that the development community at Roblox is not made only for those who can find bugs and are “techy” or able to complain enough to participate in other “hangout” type categories. I think there is a diverse community of developers at Roblox ranging from those who do visuals to those who specialize in backend related work. Forcing all members to participate in categories such as “Platform Feedback” when they might not have anything to complain about causes bloat and ultimately creates an expectation that not all developers can meet.
My suggestion is to instead allow developers to rank up in the DevForums through different means than just Platform Feedback. Since some developers might want to participate in discussions without being forced to make unnecessary Platform Feedback posts or suggestions.
EDIT: Was on mobile so lots of grammatical errors. Excuse them.
If a user cannot show that they can use important categories appropriately, they should not be ranked up. Giving them another means to become a Regular is counterproductive because any other means of becoming a Regular would not involve making quality contributions to restricted categories, which is the only thing Regular is meant to recognize.
It is unfortunate that Members cannot use Discussion until they become a Regular, but there is no other way to keep this category high-quality; we have statistics that show quality would drop abysmally if we opened it, Post Approval simply cannot accommodate it, and there is no easy way to add an additional trust level between Member and Regular so we cannot simply separate permissions for Platform Feedback from Discussion by different ranking criteria.
The issue with what you said is that there are a lot of different types of developers. Forcing all developers to make contributions to channels such as “Platform Feedback” is counter productive to forming a diverse community imo because discussing development related topics and getting involved in what developers are doing through merely talking through their concerns/problems is a good way to contribute to a community.
Again, I suggest highly monitoring channels such as #discussion from users who violate the DevForum rules by higher ranked members and if you are saying there is too many requests for Post Approval then I suggest ranking more trusted members to Post Approval or allowing the rank below Post Approval to monitor said channels. In summery, I think allowing only Regulars and up to contribute to #discussion is something that will hinder Roblox developers in general from contributing to the developers community.
The member role is meant to be a sandbox for newer users to the developer forum so they get used to how the forum works and such.
This is incorrect. The whole point of the regular role is that you were able to make posts that met the standard in #platform-feedback, and, got approved. It wouldn’t make sense for there to be ways to become a regular without using post approval at least twice.
Post approval already has a crap ton of work. Not only must they approve or decline posts, now they have to monitor them??? And doubling the amount of members in post approval doesn’t halve the response time. Remember that post approval is voluntary and members of the team will approve once they’re ready to do so.