Update to Developer Forum Entry Process

fly_san · January 17, 2019, 10:43am

Good morning. Yes, I am aware: having two convention centers is already absolutely expensive and having a third one, which might not even payoff as expected, is extremely risky. But we need to keep in mind that the amount of developers is increasing exponentially.

I’ll quote D3strat since his comment resumes my idea. The amount of Software Developers worldwide is increasing, and so is the amount of Roblox developers. Right now Roblox is one of the best opportunities content creators have to grow. This won’t change for some time, in fact it will probably only become better and bigger over the next years.

And this new update will only make it easier so people can get help from young professionals like ourselves. Imagine if back when you were a beginner, you had this chance.This means we will have more and more people willing to attend RDC.

As a heavy weight, if you consider the map you created, one can clearly see that the amount of developers in the East Cost has increased and visually surpasses the West.

April 2018

January 2019

On the other hand we are globally experiencing a trend of “virtualization”, this means people are more likely to watch conferences over the internet rather than personally. This effect is probably not as strong as it could be since in RDC there’s the factor that you’re meeting your colleagues and friends.

Generally speaking, our concern is about the sale of tickets becoming a “rat race”, which is why I speculated this. Roblox’s other option is to organize a bigger event, with more seats, more hotel rooms, more staff, etc. And I’m definitely sure their best option would be to “divide and conquer” instead of just expanding.

Having two Convention Centers in US, both smaller than RDC18 was, could be the solution.

Of course, I am not a specialist, on the contrary, I am merely speculating and giving my opinion. If you would like to add anything, please do. I’ll be glad to hear it.

fly_san · January 17, 2019, 10:48am

It’s important mentioning that since RDC19 was probably already set and organized since last year, what I speculated would only be seen in the years to come. Expecting it this year is too optimistic and even unrealistic, which is why I never mentioned this possibility.

GeorgeOfAIITrades · January 17, 2019, 10:57am

No, it’s not the same as the old forums, because:

The old forums were essentially an online chat room, that was incredibly unprofessional, filled with age ranges all over the spectrum, and was not revolving specifically around Development.

EpicWalnut5 · January 17, 2019, 11:35am

I feel like this is a good change, as it prevents people from waiting long amounts of time to join. While I am biased (I was accepted through this), it took me over three years of applying to not get accepted conventionally. Because I check the devforum nearly every day, I was given new member status.

Obviously the quality of new members should be put into question. As stated before, making things easier lowers the bar of entry, which subsequently can lower the quality of the forum. I think this can be solved with proper moderation. Depending on what an “active user” is, this new policy may act as a filter itself, save for expliot developers.

Coming back to the main point, I think this is a good update, it drastically reduces wait times (Again, i had been applying for three years and never once got accepted, or an email when the policy changed.). It reduces the workload on the staff and allows more people to be apart of the community.

drager980 · January 17, 2019, 11:57am

Well you’re just comparing it to the parts of the old forum designed almost specifically to be like a chat room.
The old sub-forums which were designed to be semi-professional accomplished their goals above standard.
Keep in mind professionalism is a premature concept in the mind of roblox’s young developers

This solution isn’t going to be much different from the old sub-forums like Scripters and Game Design. So I’m not really sure why we had to have this year long hiatus of steps to just bring back something we already had.

GeorgeOfAIITrades · January 17, 2019, 12:05pm

Only around 6 or 8 months ago Roblox transferred all of the DevForum from one database to (my understanding) their own. So, since then they’ve been tweaking the DevForum a ton. Possibly, it wasn’t accomplishable before to make it so they could let people in, without just letting everyone in, as well as having some of the anti-alt, anti-scam, anti-etc features they have said they’ve implemented. As well as, you can see this thread is extremely contested, considering it’s under 24 hours old and has over 314 (315 counting this one) replies. They’ve obviously been trying to go about it in a way where the outcome is the best possible outcome for everyone. Which is also why they have this thread, to take into account all of our feedback as we move into 2019.

The removal of the forums in the first place was because of the chat room style nature that turned into spamming, scamming, and flaming. They’re just taking appropriate steps to not further that past into the future.

Tybearic · January 17, 2019, 12:12pm

Ooh that’s how I got in, I’m glad to finally be a part of this community!

drager980 · January 17, 2019, 12:23pm

I agree, the old forum architecture sucked and was probably limited in terms of scale and change and Discourse seems superior. However I also don’t know how good these supposed quality filtering features are.
The quality of the users hasn’t changed and the barrier of entry is almost the same except it cuts off like, the lowest age of children.

This thread to me seems as if they are presenting something brand new, when it’s really just a solution which had already existed and if they really wanted to make this change it should have been almost a direct cut-over in to the new system because it was unnecessarily disenfranchising to those outside the DevForum for the extent of a year.

Ultimate_Miner64 · January 17, 2019, 2:28pm

Amazing, happens around a week after I get accepted through applications lol

DevAwesomely · January 17, 2019, 3:33pm

Well, if people like to develop on this platform, they would mostly be active on Developer Forum to see some easy tutorials, mistakes and how to fix them and much more, then they would get a chance to be accepted to Developer Forum, so THEY could tell their mistakes and make their tutorials!

JustSeanC · January 17, 2019, 4:08pm

Oh my, this was sure a long thread to read.

Glad to see this new change and glad to see that nearly everyone’s worries have been thought of and addressed in the comments.

Here’s to the future. Welcome to all the New Members!

clairosbags · January 17, 2019, 5:21pm

I’m really happy to be a new member, because I’ve been on the Developer Forum almost every day this year. I always wanted to reply to posts and help, but I hope this won’t decrease the quality of this forum though.

Spynaz · January 17, 2019, 7:27pm

Thank you! I’ve been a developer on ROBLOX for almost 7 years now and have attained several million plays on my games. However, I was never able to get into the dev forum until literally 1 minute ago. Lol

AejeongKiyo · January 17, 2019, 9:56pm

I understand that the introduction of automation can help expand the user base of the forums and bring in more contribution from devs, but since this announcement I’ve seen multiple people say and plan on creating bots to beat the site’s built-in tools, but I wouldn’t know how hard or how well they can accomplish that. Along with that, I feel that this update is counterintutive to what the forums are for.

I spent roughly a year working with blender and learning new ways to do things and the different functions it has, and I spent about 6 months waiting and when I got it, that was a major time of relief and I felt so exstatic upon getting my acceptance email. But knowing that this update came out, I wish I would’ve known that I could just be apart of basic contribution to gain access and not spend 500+ hours on blender to get to where I am.

Here’s something to put this into perspective. One of the more closed communities of Roblox is EBR, the Elite Builders of Robloxia. And with this group, there’s a selected piece of the community that takes part with that community that had to be accepted into, although this is a way smaller scale than the DevForums. But imagine if EBR just accepted people for posting and replying in the group wall? I don’t feel that would be very useful to the contribution of the EBR and the experience that they have, and doesn’t really bring anything to their table. I feel this way about these new changes as well.

I understand that with the increase in applications and the relatively small team dealing with them is a problem, but it’s a problem that could be handled a bit better. I believe automation should have some sort of play in it, whether by reducing the application count by removing duplicates, bots, or whatever else there may be, but the entirety of it shouldn’t be handed to automation. One of the most hated features to go with Roblox is the moderation and thats because of the automation. Whether it’s by false moderation, a misunderstanding by the user, or whatever else, this system does not seem to bode well with the community and I would expect it to end or become the same way with this.

If you believe I have some sort of misunderstanding with the system or perhaps I interpreted it poorly, please correct me on whatever mistakes I may have made.

tl;dr: I think this update is counterintuitive to the forums and would be the same as posting on the EBR group wall to get accepted.

vanilla_wizard · January 17, 2019, 10:02pm

I have mixed feelings, but overall I think this is for the best.

I appreciate that Roblox clearly has been working tirelessly to address the issues with the former application process and, in doing so, ensured that anyone who wants to actively contribute to the forum can do so. When I applied in November 2017 and read that applicants would receive a response within two months stating whether or not they’ve been accepted, it was demoralizing not hearing back until five months later. I’m not alone in experiencing first hand that there were too many applications to reasonably handle, and I’m glad to see that other developers, whether experienced developers or up-and-coming developers, can reliably gain the ability to participate in discussions that they feel they can add to.

That being said, I still have concerns. As an “old new member” I share the concern that the process for becoming a full member seems somewhat ambiguous without an application process. I can’t thank enough the top contributors and staff members that are dedicating so much of their time to managing the forum, but I can imagine it’s overwhelming for a handful of people to be tasked with sifting through the posts of an ever-growing number of new members to determine which users can be trusted with the permissions of a normal member.

I think it would be helpful if - rather than permanently ending the application process - active users that have been ranked as new members for a certain amount of time would have the option of sending applications featuring their work in order to show that they’re experienced developers who likely would’ve been accepted before the introduction of the new member program. I can’t say where the line should be drawn to apply, but any solution that benefits developers without putting too large of a burden on the developer relations team would be ideal.

I don’t view the automatically-accepted new members as a wave of newbies that don’t belong here; that would be assuming bad faith, and a sizable number have already started to contribute.It goes without saying that only a small percent of lurkers are going to join specifically to misbehave. I think it is useful that they can easily gain permission to post in the support section, as the support subforums of the former public forum (as well as community-created support services like Evaera’s Scripting Helpers website) were indispensable for many of us when we started working with Roblox Studio. The long term benefits of providing more resources to help content creators will certainly outweigh the downsides.

Quality concerns are still real, though I am optimistic that most of the users who don’t think they have much to contribute simply won’t, and those who are dedicated enough to post consistently (even if their contributions may not meet the standards we’d expect from full members or top contributors) will likely improve with time (in part because of these resources). I’ll be honest and say that I was worried about this change when I first learned that acceptance has been automated, but I’m confident that the benefits will inevitably outweigh our concerns once the developer relations team gets a chance to make any necessary changes to address them.

As one last point, I’m optimistic that the (to-be-announced) new process for being invited to the Developer Conference won’t exclude the new member attendees from last year, but I understand if the recent changes mean that they won’t have enough room to invite us back. I had a great time meeting other developers and staff members at RDC 2018, and I’d love to do it again given the chance.

TL;DR: It seems like the staff members are already looking at ways to address our concerns, and once they have been dealt with, this should have only upsides. Let’s not bite the newcomers.

Osewell · January 17, 2019, 10:27pm

Oh so that’s why I was randomly accepted without submitting an application!

Ultimate_Miner64 · January 18, 2019, 1:14am

Totally agreed with this one, I got accepted 8-9 days ago through applications, and after posting my first topic I got the “Anniversary” badge. Which means I have been coming here for over a year, meaning if this had happened before I would be on the Developer Forums a long time ago instead of waiting until last week.

Fa1seP0sitive · January 18, 2019, 1:17am

Is there any more information about pending requests? The answer given was somewhat vague and as it stands now there is no longer any way to currently become a full member anymore. I do appreciate the new system, although I hope that the massive flood of users doesn’t end up making this less of a community as it could easily become a sea of noise with so many voices.

byc14 · January 18, 2019, 1:34am

New Members are still able to receive full membership by demonstrating they have the ability to contribute quality content to the forum, this hasn’t changed. The New Member role is more of a buffer than a showcase of the developers skills, specifically as a process to integrate new developers into a professional environment while moving away from the older “elitist” status which was associated with the forum. It was mentioned above by @Lilly_S that they’re looking at automating this process, however at the end of the day if you can show you’re capable of contributing to the devforums you’ll receive full membership.

The best way to do that is to start contributing in #development-support and sending bug reports/feature requests through the post approval process outlined below. Lead Top Contributors will provide you with feedback, which you can then use to improve on (well in general everyone will because they’re all cool and helpful ).

TophatBloxxer · January 18, 2019, 4:05am

Well, I can say there are pros and cons on this change of the entry process. From reading how you prevent unintended users, it seems like maybe only a small amount of people who are non-developers, scammers, trolls can get in. Luckily that may be dealt-with by the moderations team, but that may mean that they may need to moderate more.

I guess many new people would say this is a good change, I mean, the previous process took way to long and many people would lose their interest if they feel that their application isn’t being read. It really is only a matter of how many applications get sent. I guess, in my opinion, maybe this change for the entry process could be a great change.