It is currently unclear when you should use ROBLOXCRITICAL in bug threads about external services.
When an issue arises with a external service (eg. today) that is preventing developers from using core functionality of Studio, or the website, many replies to the corresponding thread may be about whether or not the issue is critical.
Please make it more clear in the guidelines for when to use ROBLOXCRITICAL, since many people currently get confused when something happens to an external service that prevents them from developing. Explicitly mention server issues and whether or not / in what situations they might count as critical.
The current guidelines for reporting a ROBLOXCRITICAL issue are quoted below:
An extra tier would be helpful too - one that defines the inability of using a core feature in most cases (i.e. close to 90% of the time), but does not necessarily result in the shutdown of a program or loss of data.
Even just a tier which is used to show a bug that is having a large impact on player or developer experience and needs to be dealt with immediately, but does not fall under the ROBLOXCRITICAL guidelines would be helpful in making sure that the relevant people read it quickly.
Extra tier wouldn’t help because there’s nothing special about ROBLOXCRITICAL in terms of how fast engineers find out about it anymore. I think initially engineers would be immediately notified whenever someone posted a ROBLOXCRITICAL bug, but 90% of bugs marked as that were not actually critical, so no notification anymore. Not only that, but the extra tier would probably be misused 90% of the time too.
There are a lot of problems with our current system for reporting bugs such as:
Not being able to give developers the power to get in contact with engineers ASAP due to people who abuse it (not just ROBLOXCRITICAL issues)
Not being able to keep developers posted on the status of bugs (is it being worked on? were there issues with the release? etc) because some people would abuse and pester staff because their issue isn’t being worked on ASAP
Not being able to guarantee that every bug report is reviewed and filed internally because people abuse and post lots of duplicates / threads that aren’t actionable
We might be able to address those, but with greater privilege comes greater responsibility. In order to give developers access to items above, we would have to be very strict with bug reports – every one would have to be reviewed, similarly to the post approval process here or the “Discord Testers” discord server. This would mean no more “Roblox broke my game fix it” bug reports – you would have to spend more time making sure you had all necessary information in your bug report.
Not saying this is something we’d do, but if we were to look into it, how many of you would be interested in having to spend more effort on bug reports and in return getting better communication with engineers?
Let me post whatever – I don’t care whether engineers read it/keep me posted
Guarantee bugs are filed internally and keep me posted on their status – I’m okay with having to spend more effort making reports
I would definitely like to see if ideas and bug reports get filed instead of posting a topic and nobody let’s you know if they’re looking into it or not.
Personally, I support the view that bug reporting should be a highly-moderated area. My stance on this is quite simple:
Any post which does not make a meaningful contribution to Roblox engineers should immediately be removed. It’s our duty as forum members to ensure that in the end, every piece of text in a bug report is actually relevant to the bug and needs to be read by a staff member. If we enforce this idea and adapt it as a standard, I think we can be sure that Roblox staff will handle every bug more quickly, efficiently and be able to quickly keep us update.
I’m also in favour of a sort of “filter” for bug reports. We have exactly 90 top contributors at the moment. If we’re not as a community able to constrain ourselves and keep the discussion in #platform-feedback on-topic at all times, then I believe our Top Contributors should have the ability to either pre-approve or remove after-the-fact any bug report or comment which does not serve a purpose to the discussion.
Currently, as Echo and devSparkle mentioned, we have a situation regarding post’s bad quality, and unfortunately this leaks over to bug reports. I comprehend that sometimes it seems to be more important to quickly present a bug than to assemble all data regarding it (which takes more time) - however on a long term, quality and efficiency should always be on top of the list if we seek to give the engineers an quality source of information.
Marking your post with ROBLOXCRITICAL was the best way to report a truly critical bug, however due to the growth of the forums and other factors, it is no longer effective. Therefore, I agree that we should internalize bug reports for the sake of efficiency, as Echo presented.
