It’s pretty clear Roblox is trying to push aside it’s social aspect, and just focus on games, development, and sponsors.
Every single social aspect of the site is either a hassle to get to, hard to use because of excessive filters, or just extremely outdated.
And, there’s even less and less reasons to actually participate on the site, with more statistics being removed, and the badges being neglected, I don’t see many users actually interacting with the site in the future.
Hopefully something is done about this soon, not 1-3 years soon, 6-12 months soon. Too many features have been removed in such a short time leaving us with little to no social interaction with others via the site.
As for the closing of the forums in general, I quit using them 2+ years ago, the only side-affect it’ll have on me now is group related things. (I understand #bulletin-board exist. But it is not a permanent fix. Nor viable in the long run.)
It’s good shutting down the Roblox public Forum. That way, moderators can focus on moderating much more important things. Plus over the years, the Roblox public forums has gotten worse. But instead of public forums, there should be forums for each group with better moderation tools for group admins and a higher cap on the maximum number of groups a player can be in at once. Not everyone on roblox can be a dev. For example, clan members need a place to engage with their community. But they often not part of the roblox dev forum and their only option left is to use the group wall feature to post updates and the group wall to share their thoughts. The group wall feature on roblox is inefficient and outdated because there’s no way to search older group wall posts to view. The group wall lacks a lot of features like, bulk delete, different categories for discussion on the group wall, pinned group wall post, ability to include images in group wall posts, etc. Basically, the group wall feature should be more like the forum. The other option is for the player to go offsite to engage with their community and that’s not good because it’s not only a violation of roblox rules but it’s a safety issue. Roblox should take steps to encourage users not to break rules not just by consequences but adding features that suit their needs without going to a different website for a specific feature.
Surely if people used group forums to chat it would add to moderation complications as you would need “live” moderators to actively monitor more locations than what the old forums provided? “Live” mods would be needed in group forums surley for the same reasons they were on the old forums?
Thank you for your question! We’ve taken time and effort to reallocate the Community Engagement Team to roles in other areas of the company. Over the past five years, the CET has proven to be invaluable with their tireless work and constant support towards our goal of maintaining a happy, healthy relationship with the Roblox player community. We are thankful for their work, and have given them all the opportunity to continue working at the company in other capacities. Some members of our team have stayed on as part of the Marketing team, while others have moved on to CS/Moderation and Developer Relations. We appreciate your concern for the team.
Sorry if I took a while to reply because I’m so busy. It’s not just Roblox moderators that moderate forum posts and in game rules, it’s also the group moderators. During the earlier years on Roblox, Roblox moderators moderate everything and there was little to no moderators for that certain community on Roblox. Today, Roblox moderators mostly moderate uploaded user generated content and not so much on the social part of Roblox communities like in game chat and to ensure nobody cheats.
Most Roblox games and groups today have a community where there’s volunteer mods who moderate group wall posts and even in game on Roblox and they are the ones that enforce Roblox rules. I even know at least one community on Roblox where they have moderators. For example, the Reason 2 Die Community have moderators just for the community. Their job is to patrol the game to stop anyone from bullying anyone else, spamming in game chat, hacking, exploiting, and even glitching the game! There are some games that have a built in moderation system where it would kick or ban a player for that game. It’s possible with Roblox’s datastore API. You can even ban a player from the whole game instead of a single server if you used the Roblox datastore API correctly. So it could work by having a forum for each group on Roblox.
Group forums can have moderation like features except they don’t have the power to issue bans or warning like Roblox moderators or any other moderation actions on their account. They only have the power to moderate forum posts in a group forum and to kick or ban player in the group. If a group member complains the group moderators are abusing their power in a group, they can just leave the group and the group will lose popularity.
If a group member breaks the rules of the group forum. The group moderators can ban them from the group leaving them no place to post their thoughts for everyone to see except maybe the in game chat. This is mostly done for larger Roblox groups. However with Roblox public forums it’s on the Roblox moderators to ban them.
If you don’t understand how today’s moderation system work, I can show you a picture of a diagram to make explanation much more clear. With forums for each group, Roblox moderators will actually have less work moderating Roblox vs the Roblox public forums.
I forgot to mention that users should be able to attach any uploaded decals on Roblox that’s not been rejected to their group wall posts as well as being able to ban player from a group specifying the reason and how long the user remains banned for. Moderation is not really a big issue in this cause.
I used to use the forums all the time when trying to solve problems with my code (still do) by just doing a simple google search with my error. Now I can no longer do it.
I never thought I would miss ‘angrily’ telling people to just read the wiki
In all seriousness though, plenty of times the public scripting forum helped out people struggling with a tought process, and actually reading replies could be very informative if you skip over the sillier ones.
It’s pretty annoying when I do a google search for a problem that I am having, and I get a result that solves just the problem I need to solve—except that it was on the forums, and so I can’t actually read it.
