Update to Developer Forum Entry Process

Just to be clear, I am not a developer. I am just a guy that likes reading about new roblox updates and all that jazz. I feel this is important because if someone like me could get into the devforum, this update doesn’t just strengthen the bonds between Roblox and the developer community, it strengthens the bonds between Roblox and the community as a whole. And to that I say thank you.

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Does this mean that the member process has changed aswell?

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Not yet but it seems as if it’s on their mind. Here are the quotations about it:

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I am not sure if this is really a viable option. It seems too easy to go from not being a member to being a new member (<1 day). The process will lead to a lot of people that shouldn’t be on the forum that the automated system won’t catch. I don’t have a purposed solution, but I have a feeling the rate of 5-10 new members per hour will become unmanageable.
Also, not 100% sure how effective the alt detection is considering one of my alts is a new member now.

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Way to go! ROBLOX!
I agree that this was a needed change.

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Not yet, but they are already discussing such changes. A week ago I sent Lilly and Carlos a DM, I will post it here together with their response.

Question:

Lilly mentioned yesterday that DevRel team wasn’t satisfied with the current New Member -> Member system, are you able to detail your future expectations in relation to that?

I ask this because some people, myself included, consider it ineffective. As a Member from before the “New Members/Basic users update” I never experienced how it felt to be a New Member, and I believe this is equally valid for the Top Contributors, generally in charge of the promotion.

My question is that how could they be able to properly judge people when they have never been in their position. Of course I understand that the DevForum has rules and expectations which should be followed no matter what, and that the New Member was established to avoid low quality content from Members.

However having to submit a post which might be urgent in another category, publicly visible and unrelated to its objective, for then to ask and wait for other people to change the category is in my opinion very ineffective and retarding.

Answer:

We’re working on a potential solutions in the future, we can’t get into too many details without giving away too much. But I can promise this is actively being discussed

The Developer Forum is an elitist community and you can’t disagree.

I am literally the owner of a New Members discord server, because we, and I include myself, from the Member’s server didn’t want them to be with us. We feared the quality would drop, we didn’t want them because we feared they would be “toxic”, but in reality, weren’t we the ones being toxic? Weren’t we the ones segregating a community because of the period the were accepted in the Forum?

In reality the quality in the Forum never dropped. The Forum isn’t full of people asking “can i have robux pls”. Yes, there are ONE or TWO, posts which slipped through moderation. But I can assure you can’t list ten of these “bad apples”. In a Forum with thousands of posts, what does 10 posts represent? And for that I congratulate the Top Contributors and Developer Relations teams.

Once again, the “New Member” role is only here to guarantee the quality of discussions, it wasn’t supposed to create any segregation. But it did. Not all New Members are “bad apples”, in fact, in a server with over 300 New Members, we have only banned three or four of them (whenever it was serious enough, we reached Top Contributors and Roblox Staff).

The idea of having New Members, is absolutely important. But is it important to review every post they do? Thomas mentioned that the average waiting time is about 1 day, and that’s reasonable, but is it really contributing to the development of discussion?

EDIT: No, I do not think the Top Contributors have been doing a bad job, on the contrary: they have been incredibly helpful and effective to the Forum and I thank them for their efforts. But, on my personal view, there are better ways to promote New Members.

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This is so much easier now! I’m so glad Roblox could find a way around this problem! :slight_smile:

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I would very much like to know the requirements for both new members and to become a member. And I think I won the bet with my friend regarding the automation of the applications, after all I was one of those who received the new member without waiting.

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A Change would be really appricaited!! since i’m being an new member for around 2 years now.

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Does this mean thousands of people will get an rdc invite :sunglasses:

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As I mentioned in my previous posts, I asked Carlos about this as well, however he couldn’t give me an answer.

Question:

If possible, I also wish to be informed of the specific criteria to be promoted to New Member with this new system.

Answer:

Can’t sorry :frowning:

It’s clear however that the process requires you to be interested, reading and liking posts. I believe basic steps include your account having joined a few months ago and having a reasonable “read time” to ensure no one skims through threads to become a New Member. (This could explain why @TheNexusAvenger’s alt was accepted: it joined in 2015, has a 3h read time and 1.4k posts read.)


Lilly has also approached this in the FAQ, it’s worth reading since it’s more insightful than my question.


Regarding how to become a Member, as of now, users can’t be made Members straight away, they have to pursue the New Member - Member path.

There isn’t a post regarding the exact criteria for the promotion, but I resumed them in a reply in this same thread, you can read it here.

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May I know how this will stop exploiters and exploit developers from coming into the forum? They are still developers in their own right and knowing more about the game, or the platform, they are making a cheat for will always be a good thing to them. Contact with the developers on their cheats or getting more out of the developer because they got into this forum would be both terrible for the developer and the ROBLOX brand name.

Any idea how this will change the always prevalent possibility of cheaters and hackers from joining this forum?

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It won’t. It means that we’ll have to protect ourselves by spreading that information among each other while still abiding by the rules preventing us from stating their name.

It’s a rough cycle.

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Well I understand everyone’s happiness and excitement, this is a needed change, but you have to think of the bad before thinking of the positive.

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You’re doing a great job with this one! Thank you!

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I am a bit worried about how swamped this is going to make the forum with, well, children, but provided the Top Contributor team is up for managing that many new members I’m always happy for new people to join the developer forums.

Although as NexusAvenger mentioned the requirements to automatically gain membership should probably be adjusted. If someone comes to just read public updates (which considering events and policy changes are announced here it will happen frequently through links) they’ll end up at the required time, which as a whole isn’t good for the forums. I’m all for those who are actively reading the forum to gain membership, but perhaps the requirement should be higher.

As for your worry @len_ny, theres not really much reason to worry. You would probably be surprised at how many people here already have experience with exploits. The vast majority of new members won’t be malicious, and any information they ask for that relates to exploiting will almost certainly set off red flags. There’s always the potential for misuse of information; that shouldn’t preclude anyone from getting it.

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Its not much of a worry on my end, more of a bound to happen kind of thing. I know people will come here maliciously and I know someone is bound to attempt mass bot spam sooner or later, I just want to know whether the system is ready for such activity or it isn’t. And for your message on free information, thats how open source projects go to die or succeed, either someone makes something based off that source and put you out of business or you thrive, it’s just a matter of which will happen to your game or group.

sorry if i sound irritated or mean in this message, it is purely text on a screen with no emotion involved, please refrain from warning me and instead ask me to edit it <3

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This is indeed one of my main concerns, filtering out exploiters sounds nearly impossible…

Will they all get access to our posts about how to filter out exploiters in games?
I like that we will have a bigger community, but I don’t think this will turn out too well to be honest…

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Exploit developers have absolutely nothing to gain from being on the Developer Forum, and plenty of them either already were on here or had access through other people. This isn’t a threat that has to be taken into account. If someone starts posting “How do I hack my health in Phantom Forces and teleport everyone to me?” that post will be deleted and the account will be moderated.

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If they’re members, they will have full access to everything that members have.

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