This post is a rewritten version of my original post on this topic. I have rewritten it in an effort to more succinctly explain my viewpoint in a better manner.
“…at Roblox accessibility is super important.”
“Increasing access restrictions by looking at age or [development] success would therefore only replace one problem with many others, and does not feel true to Roblox’s open-platform vision.”
- Jed, Roblox Product Manager
As of the writing of this post, it has been a little over a year and a half since Regular became inaccessible and the manual approval team was shut down. As a result, the overwhelming majority of users have lost all avenues into posting in Bug Reports and Feature Requests.
While alternative methods to file bug reports and request features exist, both categories remain significantly more useful to users. A feature request with dozens of replies and hundreds of likes clearly shows varied interests and use cases. Sending a suggestion via Roblox’s support page does not. A bug with no immediately identifiable root cause is much easier to track down when multiple people post what triggered it for them.
To be clear: I blame neither Roblox staff nor the team previously in charge of approving posts in those categories. Both teams worked extremely hard before manual-approval became unsustainable. But, access to these categories is important, and I urge staff to utilize Discourse’s statistic based promotion system. It is a system with a proven track record: please do not reinvent the wheel.
"The user trust system is a fundamental cornerstone of Discourse. There is a natural progression for participants in any community. "
“We believe this trust system has been a success so far, as it leads to stronger, more sustainable communities by carefully empowering members, regulars, and leaders to curate and lead their own communities.”
- Jeff Atwood, Founder of Discouse, DevForum’s forum system, and Co-Founder of StackOverflow
I think the Trust Level simply needs to be reworked with the community and ROBLOX Staff. You make very clear and good points that it does need some fixing. I hope a ROBLOX Staff Member or Dev Relation Member sees this post and takes it in with a good mindset.
Edit; I just woke up and didn’t sleep well, so I could be very stupid
Speaking as someone who did Post Approval and has spent a long time here, I’d like to openly discuss my feelings.
It’s important to consider further ahead than just “why can’t I post in bug reports”, what actually occurs for Roblox to take a bug report and resolve it. These reports are dealt with by humans and thus it’s important that the quality of reporting remains high, there are already some trouble trying to get reports into the relevant places (or at least the vocalisation of these changes), any edge cases are dealt with what they are.
It also brings up an interesting question of what analytics and how to minimise gamification of the system, this already exists for Visitor → Member.
Member → Regular used stats to identify users who should be prompted, this was clean moderation, several weeks of visitation, made a few posts, and pass post approval several time.
With the removal of Post Approval, how do you substitute someone’s ability to post successful bug reports, personally like the idea of signal ratio that allowed all users to post but if you post too many negative reports, it would remove your ability to post there.
It opens questions about when should bug reports actually hit the workflow for engineers. Along with how to minimise the inflation of stats.
I could see a world where someone with an extended time here, providing many many topics and replies which on average has a high receivability, that offers solutions accepted my the majority of users, being the route for regular; or even that regular as a whole is made redundant and groups are used instead. There are only ever 4 trust levels on a discourse forum.
The wider question is just considering the entire workflow and finding how to best optimise it. It’s not a fast process as we’ve all seen but it doesn’t mean nothing is done yet.
Great post.
It makes sense but the conversion into regulars feels stupidly useless since it doesn’t effect my developments nor profits.
I don’t think many people really cares now, it’s like the fact of having a gray stain on your socks, it doesn’t matter.
It does affect many people greatly such as myself which has 8 pending bug reports with @Bug-Support bug reports take incredibly long (sometimes months) to have a topic created as a Member, while if I was Regular I could simply just create the topics with the Bug Wizard right now.
And as Developer Engagement doesn’t seem to respond to any of my requests to change the category of my feature request (or any of my DMs), making a feature request on the DevForum is more-or-less impossible as a Member.
Hey! Thanks for writing up your thoughts, really appreciate it. There was a similarly themed topic recently, which I wrote a longer response to. You can take a look here. Hope that shines a light behind the scenes!
The promotion system from Member to Regular should be based on stats and community feedback. If this person has a decent reputation, is active on the DevForums, doesn’t have any strikes or violations, and has made a few posts, they should be ranked up to Regular.
Thanks for the reply! I understand Roblox’s dilemma in creating a system in which everyone can contribute, while still maintaining a certain level of quality for those topics. You mentioned in another post the possibility of leveraging the entire community to solve issues such as these, and I think that’s something that can certainly be applied here:
Allow anyone to post, but keep posts made by non-Regulars hidden to engineers at first. Upon the post reaching some arbitrarily high number of replies, likes, and views, with some amount coming from Regulars, make it visible to engineers.
Such a system would form a crowdsourced post approval team. Utilizing this method would allow anyone to make contributions while requiring significant interaction from many people, including Regulars, thus allowing for an automatic gauge of post quality.
Due to the relatively small number of Regulars, as well as the nature of this proposed system, getting a post through to engineers as a Member would be inherently difficult and slow at first. But returning to the previous method of Regular promotions — requiring certain statistics, a clean record, and some number of posts approved — would work with this system quite well too. As posts slowly get approved, more Regulars will gradually appear, and thus more posts will get approved over time.
Coupling all of this with @railworks2’s idea of a signal ratio would form what I believe is the best compromise between accessibility, quality, and automacy.
Hey there, our approach for solving the access issues is to remove the need for forum ranks to determine this, and instead move to group-based access where you can request to join the groups on a self-serve matter. This resolves the problems described in this thread.
Everybody here in the current topic that made a post or Liked one of the posts (as of Mar 19) has had their join request accepted if they submitted one.
I’ve specifically also made sure that you as original poster @Secretum_Flamma are added to the bug report access group.
For everybody else that participates here later than this reply, please follow the instructions in the linked announcement above on how to get your join request in. We are slowly accepting people from the backlog to make sure we don’t overwhelm internal teams, but it is our goal to clear out the backlog. It will take us some time before we’re caught up with requests so appreciate your patience here.
This resolves the issue for all bug reporting categories.
Please check out the update I posted there for further information. I will close this thread so that all further discussion is centralized in the thread above.
Thank you for posting this and for your patience so far as we work through these issues!
