I completely understand why there are requirements on forum read time before being able to post. While I do not have much development experience in Roblox, I have a good bit of development experience outside of Roblox. I understand that having a minimum read time before being able to post is critical for keeping basic homework-like questions out of the forums. It can also teach people how to have an educated conversation and properly ask questions.
With that being said, it is extremely frustrating having to spend so long to even be able to post. It is completely unnecessary to have to read over 100 topics, and over a thousand posts. I have seen many developers simply not use these forums due to the ridiculous requirements to be able to post. Instead, we should set the requirements much lower but require people to read through the documentation.
From what I currently understand, the requirements to post are as follows:
- 4 hours of forum read time
- 150 topics read
- 1.5k posts read
Reading 150 topics is redundant. If people don’t learn how to post properly after reading 50 topics, reading 150 won’t help much more either. As the increased number of posts doesn’t help teach people how to properly ask questions, it is unnecessary.
More reasonable requirements would be as follows:
- 1.5 hours of forum read time
- 50 topics read
- 500 posts read
The only problem is that creating accounts to spam becomes much easier with these new requirements. To counter this, we should require users to read through Roblox’s documentation. Forcing users to read through the documentation will teach people to answer their own questions, which will reduce basic homework-like questions. If users are not reading through documentation, then they definitely are not experienced enough to be on developer forums.
We should use the following requirements:
- 1.5 hours of forum read time
- 50 topics read
- 500 posts read
- 1 hour of documentation read time
- 10 pages visited in the documentation
Using these requirements will better teach people how to answer their own questions, reduce the amount of unnecessary work to be able to post, and still keep out spam.
Another problem is the lack of transparency about the requirements needed to join the forums. This is a problem as when I was trying to read enough to be able to post, I had no clue how much I needed to be reading or what I should be reading. Posting the exact requirements would be a poor idea, as it would make it easier to bot the process. Instead, we should make the discobot message the user with something along the lines of the following:
Welcome to the forums!
In order to reduce spam, new users cannot immediately post. We require users to read through topics, posts, and Roblox’s documentation. Expect to have to read for at least a few hours before gaining access to posting.
We hope you enjoy the forums!
When viewing a topic or documentation page, if you are not signed in you should get a message alerting you that you are not signed in. Over the past year I have been reading through topics but I was never signed in since you are automatically signed out after a certain amount of time. Because of this, I got no credit for those many hours reading through posts.
TLDR: Having to read 150 topics over the course of 4 hours is completely unnecessary to be able to post. If people do not learn how to properly post questions after reading 50 topics, then 150 won’t help much more. Due to this, we should decrease the number of topics read and time reading required to be able to post. As decreasing the time needed to post will increase spam, we should require users to read through Roblox’s documentation. This will teach users how to answer their own questions, and make it harder for spammers to create accounts.
Edit: FroDev1002 made a good point, we shouldn’t reduce the amount of time required as we shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken. I think it would be more reasonable to require a total of 4 hours of read time across forums and documentation. I still think the reduced standard of 50 topics and 500 posts read would be a good idea. Then, also add in the minimum of 10 pages of documentation being read. This way it is easier to access forums, while still discouraging inexperienced developers from asking basic homework-like questions due to still requiring 4 hours of total time required. Even better, people will be forced to learn how to read and use documentation, a vital skill for development.
Feel free to give me feedback!
Thank you for reading!
