Uncertainty about professionalism in this forum

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#1

Hiya, I don’t post much in these forums but I certainly do a lot of reading.

I’ve been in devforum since it’s inception in 2013, and over the years I’ve seen the community grow with more talented people for sure. But with each update which turns out to be a controversial topic among users has become more of a spotlight for these forums, and not for the right reasons either. Instead of seeing constructive criticism and feedback with a friendly approach to encourage communication between both devs and the staff at roblox (Those that still do that I love you), I’m seeing a lot of hate fueled posts and negativity which could be handled in the former manner, but because of this using the dev forum has not been an enjoyable experience at all, and I feel that this hostility has the potential to or has already harmed our ability to communicate effectively with the staff without fear of having it thrown back at them.

I just wish people wouldn’t take their position in this forum for granted and appreciate being given the opportunity to be here, rather than just spew hate across all the site. I was potentially thinking for devforum entries to become stricter as to having a good standing with the community too, or enforcing rules within the forums already to maintain an at least civil atmosphere because I’m struggling to take this place seriously sometimes.

What do you guys think? Feel free to put your thoughts on this thread.

11 Likes
#2

I’m fairly new around here, but I have tried my best to take in whatever people say. I have however seen examples of people being fairly - well - rude, directly to ROBLOX admins.

Edit: my sin so far was posting in public forum with a bit of a silly question just to talk to Cyclone :wink:

#3

You exactly said what I was thinking.

:heart:

#4

I don’t think that people whose responses were so blatantly rude and non-constructive that they had to be deleted from that thread will be posting a whole lot in the future. (Not saying anything will be done about them - I don’t know that. I don’t think Roblox staff will take very kindly to those who blatantly insult them and their co-workers, though.)

That said, I agree with you. Unfortunately, there’s only so much I can do in terms of steering people and threads in the right direction. I can’t make people act more reasonably or maturely, and I think that’s going to bite the dev forums in the ass in the future.

#5

When people earn money from something, they will fight tooth and nail to keep it.
I can see why some people might get heated when things they like are removed.

Some things that I can remember caused a stir because it affects their income:

  • Removal of tix (Loss of total money in economy)
  • Removal of video ads (Loss of money for mobile developers)
  • Removal of stats on gamepasses (Lack of aspiration when seeing other people’s stats)
  • Removal of BodyColors (Less options for new players may turn them away)

When people are threatened with redundancy in jobs, they have a somewhat similar reaction. Roblox already made me lose most of my income here and I’ve grown to accept it after having a similar reaction.
The trick to calming those people is to be open about the decision-making process so that they can understand it. The lack of communication leads to misinformation which just flares tempers more.

But that’s just my 2 cents.

6 Likes
#6

Frankly I’m one responsible for getting unjustly angry at Staff (and yeah I appreciate everything they do, I’m never truly hateful towards them), but usually because they tend to do things that nobody likes, asked for, or otherwise asked for but never got. I’m not expecting any apologies though I would like these problems to be reminded:

  • Moderation in general is particularly problematic, there are endless cases of assets being rejected for poor or no reason (I was once Warned because somebody doesn’t know what a cannabis leaf actually looks like).
  • The Filtering requirement. Devs HAVE to learn how to use FE (even if it is better in the long run) if they want to have a popular game, and games have been taken down anyway due to (false?) reports of lack of Filtering.
  • DevEx was made exclusive to OBC, people like me bought lifetime TBC before it was implemented. I don’t know if it’s possible for me to upgrade but I’m not going to waste more money for less money.
  • The mandatory filter is #### a #### in the ### and #### ## # ##### players ## #### # #####. Seriously.
  • The ENTIRE mess with Fonts. We waited more than four months (after being promised it would be Coming Soon) and at the end Staff tells us that the fonts we voted for were unusable. The fonts we have now are amazing anyway, but why keep us in the dark so long?
  • Every time someone showcases an improvement to the Lighting system “oh, we can’t implement that because of… uh, data reasons! :)”

EDIT: that said, I do respect the Staff and try to maintain a decent tone on the forum. You shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you, but the hand can feed you bad food sometimes.

2 Likes
#7

This happens for any forum and it so happens that this forum gets one of the best moderation and what you can see in RbxDev is far more structurized than pretty much anywhere else.

People who post here in a hateful manner are usually ones who will not teach you much at all about development. Since posts are not natural conversation like voice chat or eye contact, people can’t feel your intentions - the guy who “posts angrilly” might not sound as insulting. Likewise, the guy who tries to calm him down might sound like an arrogant butt.

There’s no other tool to remove negative posts than completely ignoring them. If you feel like you need to take action, just flag. People will stop posting about things that are not relevant and don’t bring them attention.

No, a forum can’t be perfect and all clean, without a single off topic post.

I felt like this forum had to be like a “royal family” without any imperfection too (I’ve been here since the start), but now I enjoy it just the way it is - everything I need to know this forum perfectly provides and I don’t let the forum to take care of what I feel or think because I can perfectly manage that myself.

Though if you wanted this forum to be “perfect”, the cap for members should be like 50. :smiling_imp: please don’t ban.

2 Likes
#8

Yes. This so much. I never see any of the people who spew B.S. on the ‘Look what I made’ section and I’ve always found that connection interesting. I’ve been here since the start as well and got banned like 1.5 years later because we had this same issue and I wasn’t handling it too well either. I got re-invited though and I’ve noticed that the forum still has the same issue, but now more people are a part of the problem.

Whoever is letting all of these people in seems to have good intentions, but it’d be great if users had like a ‘test’ period for a month where their every post would be sent to some mini-mod (the only reason we should have mini-mids, imo, but that’s for another post) and at the end they’d decide if this person is good to keep in the forums.

This way “inactive” people like some of the artists here who don’t post aren’t harmed, but some of the new recruits that we’ve gotten recently could be focused on a bit more.

#9

Is flagging a post once guarantees a moderator review, or does there have to be more? Orrr is it not reviewed at all, just hidden after a threshold of flags.

#10

Flagging a post does notify the admins. If a post gets flagged enough, it’ll automatically be hidden from view.

Some posts in the body colors thread got hard deleted, meaning an admin just went in and deleted them from the thread completely. I can’t see those posts, though I believe I saw one of them just before it got nuked.

1 Like
#11

If there’s anything I’ve learned being a teenager after all these years its that a lot of us are extremely influenced by emotion. When something happens we disagree with, we will give a lot of decent points, but its very emotionally charged and can be insulting. But on the flip side it never means we don’t appreciate who is might of been insulted. We still do. Its just some things are frustrating and people acting out is how a lot vent that.

Regarding professionalism on the forum, there’s a lot of people of varying ages so I can’t imagine a totally professional environment. I think a lot of people here enjoy a more relaxed and cool environment since professionalism can often feel strict.

On the flip side, I think users would be a lot more calm if ROBLOX at least gave us a ‘hey we’re listening to your complaints’ more often. Sometimes it feels like we are ignored or shrugged off when its not the case but a ‘we’re listening’ reply just makes the transparency of the dev-staff interaction on the forums feel more human than us talking to a brick wall.

3 Likes
#12

It’s already pretty inactive as it is. Having 50 members would just amplify that. Inactivity is especially obvious during GMT (my timezone)

#13

Well compared to 2013, theres probably double or triple the posts a day, today then back then.

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#14

Yeah, I wasn’t here sadly to see that. No reason to regress though.

1 Like
#15

My two cents on the state of this forum

There are a few inherent problems with fora in general and we’re starting to see those now:

Hive mind mentality
One of the main problems with fora is that it works similar to democracy. If your opinion is in line with what most people think, you’re going to get praised for it. There are even features in place in most fora which encourage this mentality: In Discourse for example we have ‘likes’ and in Kunena we had ‘thank you’s’. People in general like to take the opportunity to gain status even if it comes at a little cost. That cost often times is making an off-topic post, slamming someone’s opinion or acting slightly different from how you would normally act; things that aren’t in line with the rules of this forum but still encouraged due to the way fora work.

Negativity
People tend to raise their voice only when ‘bad things’ are happening. People like it when things are going right, and if things are going right there is no need to address the fact that things are going right. You can just relax and enjoy the situation. People don’t like it when things are going wrong though, so that’s when you will see an influx of comments. This means that the ratio of negative versus positive comments is not in line with the actual ratio of negative versus positive situations. This in line will paint the picture that ‘we should act in a more negative manner because the average comment is way more negative than the average situation’, which unconsciously influences the hive mind mentality in an unfortunate way.

Laziness
A big issue with people is that we are lazy. We don’t like to read, we don’t like to fact check and we rather put as little effort into something as required. This is a big issue if you want to maintain quality on a forum. Constructive criticism requires more words than a simple call out, and if both comments have the same effect, why not take the easy way out, right? Longer comments are often times skipped over because it takes a longer time to read them and often times doesn’t affect the reader anyways. This means that shorter, more snarky comments tend to get read more often and receive more likes because of that, making it even more appealing to make shorter responses of lower quality. This is probably also why the tutorial section is so empty. Making a tutorial requires a lot of effort (I would know, I wrote a few already) and they often times don’t get much aknowledgement, making it really unsatisfying to write them.

Dunning–Kruger effect
Due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, people who are less knowledgable on certain subjects tend to have more confidence than people who are more knowledgable on that subjects. And the more confidence you have, the more likely you are to respond to questions or topics on those subjects. This of course doesn’t mean that ‘the more you post the more stupid you are’, but if you look closely you will see that a lot of intelligent developers on this forum are really inactive because of this effect.

If we want to improve the quality of this forum we should first aknowledge that there are issues which need to be addressed. If I personally were in charge of this forum I would make the following changes:

  • Remove likes (I know I’m guilty of trying to farm those).
  • Increase moderation.
  • Increase the minimum number of characters/words needed before you can post something (one sentence posts don’t really contribute 9/10 times anyways)
  • Add some kind of motivator which encourages us to write tutorials, answer questions and discuss development

Most importantly however, we need to understand the purpose of this forum and act accordingly. Be respectful towards each other and try to tackle problems from other people’s perspectives. Don’t be afraid to flag posts and also don’t be afraid to talk about non-Roblox subjects in other places than this forum, like the RBXDev Discord server for example.

10 Likes
#16

I can definitely understand your point about likes, but I also see benefits to keeping them. They can be used as a token of appreciation rather than having to add a “Thank you!” or “Support” post to the thread, which saves on clutter. For threads asking for a solution and there are several available, they can be used to find out what would be a good solution (although, the “best” solution may not be the most popular one, but this is why likes are public so you can see who liked it).

The character limit should be as easy as adjusting one value in Discourse, if they wanted to do that.

I think we can make huge steps in professional behaviour if we collectively start flagging posts for being off-topic more often (even if they’re not offensive per se), and also collectively try to stay on-topic in the more serious categories here.

3 Likes
#17

I think the issue is miscommunication … or the lack thereof.

The filtering is notorious for a lot of the frustration that has risen. When the new filters were added, nobody made it clear to this community that they were actually working on a proper solution. People actually believed these horrible filters were going to be kept- it was a common belief and people were legitimately upset about it.

If it were not for the new contacts and people I’ve met through this forum, I would’ve been under the impression that these filters were here to stay. I would have been angry. I was able to stay calm about it because I heard it was going to be fixed. The thing is, whatever information I heard was supposed to be kept discreet.

There is not much transparency here when there should be. This is vital in maintaining a positive and supportive community, at least on this forum.

If the admins are upset that people are spreading misinformation, then why isn’t it addressed on here? Feed us the right information and tell us that you’re going to drop a buggy site-wide filter on us for testing and that you have a solution that you can actually talk about. Most of the time, all I’m seeing is, “We will address this problem soon but we can’t talk about it.”

What is it about the new filters that is needed to be kept secret?

If they are going to drop an update that upsets a hard majority of the community, then we are owed an explanation. It’s the only way to keep everyone from being frustrated. I would be delighted if we had a “bad” update and was informed why it was added than be kept in the dark. That is what upsets people and justifiably so.

1 Like
#18

I still see way too many juvenile jokes & acidic responses here, even outside the Lounge. I feel like any forum has that issue when it gets to a certain amount of members, though, and sometimes you just have to take the bad with the good.

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#19

IMO, It is extremely hard to keep a forum professional when the website that it is modeled after is geared towards children, ROBLOX’s recent updates reflectant of that.

#20

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think the major issue here is that the staff aren’t being as proactive as they could with moderation. They’ve distanced themselves even further since the switch to Discourse, so I think their goal is to automate the process so it’s low-maintenence, but there’s no magic solution for managing human resources. Even employees who should be “responsible” enough to handle their jobs need to be carefully handled.

When we have users intentionally and repeatedly harassing others, and nothing being done about it, people get frustrated that there’s nothing that can be done about it. With all the frustration that’s been bred by this, the general attitude of the community becomes more hostile by the day.

ROBLOX doesn’t necessarily need to micromanage the forums themselves – they can delegate that responsibility, like with the “leader” trust level – but those this is delegated to have to have the appropriate tools needed to do their job, and right now, they don’t.

1 Like