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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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…
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.
If you publish your techniques publicly, it’s already too late. Any serious anti-cheat attempts should be private to the individual game or games at hand. As I said previously, exploiters already had access to the forums through intermediaries, this changes nothing.
I understand your worries and I even reiterate them, but hasn’t it always been like that? I mean, the new system still requires effort from users to join the Forum, and you can’t even see all the categories. It can also take months to be promoted to Member, and that itself discourages them to even try. It’s the same psychology trick used to discourage criminals to invade a building: as soon as there are barriers (CCTV, Reinforced windows, Security Guards, etc) they will be less likely to attack said building.
There have always been issues with malicious users here, maybe we will see a rise in that, but maybe we won’t. The Developer Relations team have been actively and personally monitoring the recently accepted New Members to ensure they do not have such intents.
So, for now what I’d do is help them - what does it take to flag or contact staff/top-contributors regarding a suspicious user?
Not particularly. I’m tempted to speedrun devforum New Member status to show the problems. If what Nexus said was true, we have a problem that needs to be explained
AFAIK, speed running takes hours. I may experiment again when I have a spare computer not in use. It can be psuedo-automated if you have a method to automatically scroll.
Discourse has anti-spam functionality built into it so I have faith it will prevent mass spamming.
And yes. Not all information should be freely available. But at the same time, they’re new members. I wouldn’t call what they can access high risk, and if someone ends up being promoted to a full member and is actively producing exploits that will be resolved quickly. I in particular would prefer that serious exploiters who produce serious exploits be here rather than someplace else because there’s at least a chance they will report bugs and exploits they find here if they’re members.
And as others have said: if your game or project has a vulnerability that can be exposed by what you say on the developer forums, that’s a bad thing and you should fix that, either by not saying that thing or by fixing the vulnerability.
That could be a problem but again. The vast majority of new members won’t be targeting people here because to be honest we’re not easy targets. It’s more lucrative (apparently, given the bot spam) to target normal users. I see little reason why that would change.
