This idea doesn’t make much sense to me. I’d rather put effort into improving/scaling the category for everyone (including anonymous non-logged in users) and this just seems like avoiding the problem. We shouldn’t duplicate forum categories for that reason.
Obviously cutting out a select portion of a community and giving them a category of their own is going to lead to a perceived higher quality level of discussion, because the volume is lower and it is hard to get into the selection, but this doesn’t scale at all.
We need ideas that scale properly. Ideally we’d run the support categories in a format such as Stackoverflow rather than discussion threads. That kind of format is much more suitable for answering support questions and making sure the best answers get the most attention. The focus should be on motivating the behaviors that we want to see, not by making more small select communities.
The issue is that, with the volume of new members being introduced to the forum, this isn’t very practical. I don’t see what else you can do to get new members to follow the rules without completely overwhelming post-approval?
I like this idea, but is it even possible with Discourse? I know you can have plugins on it, but I’m not sure how far those go in that regard.
I don’t understand what doesn’t scale about it. I understand that it’s not the perfect solution and that it would be a temporary one until a more long-term solution is put into place (which I doubt will be any time soon) but I don’t see an issue with it in terms of scaling.
The biggest issue currently (which is frustrating many people) is that the current setup for development support just doesn’t work. My hope, if anything else, for this thread is that it raises enough awareness for the clear issues with the support category currently and the community comes up with ways to solve it.
I’m in agreement with what you’ve said but @buildthomas does raise some very crucial counter-arguments that I believe should be considered at the same time. Newer members that are unfamiliar to the forums and development within a general consensus may not always make insightful contributions - but it doesn’t mean that we should totally disregard their presence and hide away in the shadows.
If you want support from a specific group of developers, then Discord servers such as the DevForum server always are available in case you need help. Sometimes getting a mixture of viewpoints is helpful - even if the replies are monotonous and don’t actually have an impact. At least that user has gone to some extent to leave a reply, and that willingness to contribute shouldn’t not be acknowledged.
Personally though, I do like the way in which members can easily join the forums, if they show a desire to be active and grow their skills. Most of the full members you see around were once in the exact same position, so let’s not target an individual group of people on that basis. I still think that having somewhere within the Lounge for exclusively discussing development issues could be beneficial.
On a final note: if you don’t think a certain reply is helpful, then you can always flag the response so then you can filter through responses that way.
Giving bad advice is not a violation of the rules. So this doesn’t work. You could DM the user to fix the advice, but there’s the chance they won’t fix it, and correcting it publicly via reply only gets you flagged.
I should’ve specified better what I meant by this…
Generally speaking, if a reply is off-topic or derails the thread within that sense, then you can, and probably should flag it. Then again, bad advice should just be ignored. Your tips do work for dealing with bad advice, but personally I would let the person who replied go on with their day and save the hassle of bothering them.
It is a good idea because in theory it further sorts out information and makes things easier to find and read. I disagree it is “prejudice” in a negative way. There are other parts of the forum that don’t allow new members to post. The downside I could see would be that the new member discussions would receive less and less help because the members would all spend time in their own section.
You’ve brought up an interesting problem for sure.
As others have mentioned in this post, it can be quite annoying when a user tries to help when in fact they have no idea about a word they’re saying.
However creating another category specifically for members(basically what @buildthomas mentioned) is just a bandaid solution.
The issue is beyond the forum if we want to maintain justice in the community. Some people just want to be part of the discussion, some people just want to get a little boost in their stats, and some are just trying to be helpful.
This is something our forum cannot change because this issue is something solved in-person and done somewhere more appropriate.
I think there’s something missing from your argument, but I see where you are coming from. To become a new member you need to browse the forum for a bit and get some reading done. New members aren’t used to participating in the community as much because of this - and there are the few new members who expect the forum to do stuff for them.
However, isolation is not the solution. There are a lot of good reasons already mentioned, but here’s the one I am considering.
If members get their own category for development support, what will happen to the new member category? The new members on the forum generally rely on members to make meaningful posts. Members are the role models - giving them a better place is the same as removing a critical pillar of support for new members. I’m not saying that members are better developers than new members; however, new members are generally less experienced and would benefit from advice from members who have experience helping others in the past.
That’s also not to say that members would be extinct in the new member support category. But it’s likely that many members will mainly use the member support category and will rarely visit the old one, which causes this imbalance of experience in the development support categories. I think that this imbalance is more substantial than providing an automatic filter for those who don’t want to publicize the forum for the benefit of others. The whole point of the forum is to share ideas and help each other, not segment and divide.
Yes I understand, but the lounge is just that - a lounge. Members don’t go there because they feel like helping someone or taking a look at the issues people are having with development like scripting, GUI design, etc… If the support category becomes separated by rank then members may have a tendency to go to the member-designated category since they know that there won’t be spam or pleas for code. I mean, that’s the whole point of making the category as OP said - it’s a filter for members so they don’t have to go through useless threads and so they receive higher quality support.
I don’t think it’s wise to compare a lounge to a support category for this reason. It’s not that you can’t find support in the lounge, but I’m pretty sure that when devs need help, they will go to the support category. That’s why I’m afraid that dividing the support category will cause a problem:
My reasoning is not meant to be generalizing - I am simply talking about support category repercussions.
I agree with this. I’m a new member, but the amount of low-quality posts on the support categories is frustrating and so are the one-line responses I see from new members who have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.
By the way, how does one become a member? I heard it’s automated now or something but I feel like I should be a member by now.
I agree with this for the most part, however not necessarily the solution. I do think something has to be done about the support categories, because as of right now it’s extremely hard to find useful support. A large majority of the support categories (or atleast scripting support) is full of low-quality and bad advice.
I’m not against a member-only support category but I’d prefer a better solution. Whenever I first joined devforum, I spent all my time helping people in scripting support. It wasn’t that bad, but as time went on the quality slowly got worse, and worse. This will continue to happen unless a solution is proposed. The solution in OP won’t help in the long run so I do think a better solution should be considered, whatever that may be.
You could argue that you can just flag the low-effort posts, threads, etc (assuming they break rules) however a very large majority of Scripting Support probably falls under this category. From what I’ve been told, there’s already a lot of flags that have yet to be processed by staff and I don’t think adding onto that list is a good solution for the staff, nor the actual forum. Everything on this forum is pretty much volunteer, PA don’t get paid, roblox doesn’t earn money from this, and there’s no reason to hire a ton of paid-staff just to handle a forum that can’t pay for itself.
I’m not really sure what a good solution could be, however if something can be done without negatively impacting part of the community, I do think it should be pursued.
I understand where you’re coming from, however I don’t think adding a member-only support category will do any good. I feel like the best solution to this problem would be to simply promote active moderation, which all of us can do. No, you don’t need to minimod (replying to posts saying they’re breaking the rules etc). There’s a flagging feature for this very reason, and I think people should be encouraged to use it under the right circumstances.
Not the only one facing the same issue. I have been in the forum since 2016 and consistently active for a long time now, but I’m still a new member. Yet people with less read time than me and less active already have the member rank (not pointing out any names). I’m not sure what’s wrong, as I’ve never even received a single strike on the forum.
Flagging only works when used correctly and enforced actively.
If there are way too many flags, it’s important to measure and know if the issue is in people flagging incorrectly, or on a lack of moderation activity.
I can’t say much about this without statistics or insight from someone with access to the flagging system, but the idea behind flagging posts is not bad and should work, in theory.
It works in theory but in the wild it’s increasingly difficult to regulate and control. I think for the issue of flagging to be solved Roblox first needs to regulate who actually comes into the forum much more.
Looking at lots of these posts it’s clear that many of these people aren’t over the age of 13. This should be (and last I checked is) a basic requirement of the forum.
The issue with taking young children onto the forum, especially under the age of 13, is that may (not all) cannot understand the requirements that should be met before flagging a post and even if they do understand many ignore that and do it anyway, without understanding the later consequences of doing so.
Like you said though, we need proper stats from people with access to the system.
Too many flags is one issue, but the other issue is giving bad advice doesn’t violate any rules. That is where some low quality comes in. Not just off-topics or spams. So what do we do when someone does it? We can’t flag bad advice just for being bad advice.
DMing someone about it has a chance they will ignore you, and just replying publicly without a DM gets you flagged for some reason as offtopic or spam. I don’t know why.
Lose-lose situation here. A member-only category as a band-aid fix for now should work
Making giving bad avice agaisn’t the rules would also be problematic, as more than often people that give the bad advice are genuinely convinced that what they’re saying is true / correct.
I believe the low quality doesn’t come from the bad advice. Bad advice is just another issue that comes from a larger scale problem. Others have mentioned this before in this topic, but I’ll mention it again for the sake of this post: some / a lot of the people that join the forums as new members are either below the age of 13, or not developers themselves.
This obviously comes with lack of proper post quality.
This is incorrect, as long as you are not attacking the person that posted the bad advice, and as long as you keep true to the post’s question / problem.
Your post will only get flagged as off topic or spam and removed if it truly does not belong to the topic’s theme.
I’m strongly against band-aid fixes unless if they are absolutely necessary. It is much better to cut the problem by the root than to keep applying band-aid fixes. If we were to implement a development support category just for Members, then people would most likely start requesting the same for other categories, creating a snowball.
New Members can be way more experienced developers than Members maybe I mean maybe even being top developers. It all depends on how dedicated and how much time you spend on the developer’s forums.
Using the post approval process to respond to regulars-only support posts could be an interesting way of getting promoted to regular. I think it’s a good idea.
