There’s a certain group of highly engaged forum users that have a habit of sniping the first few replies on announcement with something generic, then watching for the general consensus / subsequent discussion of the replies, and editing their post to (presumably) maximize the amount of views/likes they receive on their posts.
This is abusive behavior because these users don’t have actually relevant feedback on the change and are just trying to game forum statistics for whatever reason.
When a reply is made to an announcement, it should be locked from editing after 1-5 minutes. This gets rid of the incentive of the abuse behavior above, and lets developers who actually have a stake in the update have their feedback be more visible to Roblox staff.
This forum should focus on developers and people that want to provide genuine, constructive feedback to Roblox staff. DET should actively guard against the abusive behavior and users described above.
I’ve been watching this happen for a while too; it’s very dishonest and infuriating to see. While I would prefer not hamstringing other users on the forum for the behavior of a minority, this would very effectively shut that behavior down completely. Perhaps doing this for a few months would stop it altogether.
By forcing you to write your post in its entirety within 1-5 minutes, you are forced to think before posting, and you will refrain from posting if you do not actually have significant feedback on the change.
Wouldn’t a better solution be to lock down announcements completely? To all users. I had actually suggested this before. As for feedback, they can be given through a survey or something like that. This would also disincentivize one-liner posts of “thanks” or “cool” or stuff like that due to the nature of them.
I also notice in #help-and-feedback where it is made to be a race to first reply. Generally what happens is users write really short, generally unhelpful, explanations or just linking to other stuff, but when more in depth self-made replies come in, they then edit their post to make it a bit more in depth based on the other replies, just to snipe a solution.
I personally have experienced people literally stealing my self-made code samples in #help-and-feedback:scripting-support. Not 1:1, they usually change casing and spacing, but it’s still clear who their inspiration is lol. Maybe this should apply to #help-and-feedback categories as well.
I think this ties in with issues with people breaking the flow/“continuity” of the thread. I’ve seen people edit in quotes of posts below them and respond to them, which always gets me confused because I won’t have read the post they’ve replied to. I could support this being applied further than just #updates across the forum, but that might be a drastic measure for some categories, namely portfolios and bulletin board.
I feel that if they do turn off replies, I can read the announcements in peace and not have to worry about seeing repetitive messages - sometimes ones that are fully against a new change that may not be related to the topic.
I would support this- the only reason I try and get edits in is so staff will actually see my post above the clutter. I could care less about stats, I just want to be heard. If replies are off, clutter would be eliminated, solving the issue.
I’ve learned to just stop liking those posts after I liked one of them, and then a while later I check back and see that it’s been edited into something completely different. It’s bait-and-switchy and I don’t like it.
I think 5 minutes is a good balance to prevent this problem without being too restrictive.
I wouldn’t support this because if your feedback about the update is too far down to scroll, the staff isn’t going to reply to it. Maybe because most of the posts are just “yay new update I love”.
I have no support for this whatsoever. Yeah, some people snipe Announcement posts, but not all of them are just for views and likes. Some are actual feedback and opinions toward to announcement. That shouldn’t be discouraged.
Make a new rule stating not to do this, and have 1 DET member watch the top 10 posts for a few hours following the announcement being unlocked. If they’re caught editing their reply for the intention of boosting forum stats, delete the reply and give feedback. Repeated offenses would give a strike.
Only apply the editing time limit to the top 10 posts.
Not sure how well any of these would work, just some random thoughts. But if a editing time limit becomes too inconvenient for innocent users, these are alternate options.
(Note that I’m not saying that I disagree with the OP’s idea; I’m just suggesting alternate ways this could be solved if the editing time limit becomes an annoyance.)
I didn’t realize how much of a problem this was until I noticed all the first few replies to Announcement posts have been edited at least 3 times. If anyone is unsure that something should be done about this, I highly recommend checking the first replies on any recent announcement post.
It’s fine to post early on in an announcement. It’s not fine to post something real quick and then completely edit a post to be 10x as long / have a completely shifted tone an hour later on. They should create a new post or wait with posting until they have formed a coherent opinion if that is truly actual feedback.
Can’t you simply flag the replies as spam if they are adding nothing constructive to the topic, and given this is announcments almost any replies would be by definition spam and therefor are flagable.
What happens is that the original reply starts with “Thanks! Great update. This is useful to be because X.” Then when the other replies flow in, the first reply is edited with “also, I spot X” or “I wish we can do X.”
One of the detriments from this (other than those like farmers), is that the replies underneath can sound repetitive since the original already had edited the content in. Most users, especially skimmers or newcomers don’t notice the editing trickery happening and scoff at bottom replies thinking that they’re not adding anything new.
I remember when some update came out, I pointed out a problem, with my reply being 5th or something. Then, the first reply was edited to include something similar, but the intention was blatantly obvious. I politely DMmed the author to inform them, sure they removed that edit from that particular post, but continued to do so for future announcements.
The people who do this care more about getting likes than getting a DM from a staff member to have that feature added/bug fixed. The latter should be the ideal incentive for posting, but sadly the sheer attention to update topics indirectly foster this kind of behavior.
I honestly believe, that instead of adding minor measures to limit abusive behavior, the entire reply system of announcements should be scrapped. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t a survey system much better and more organized to look at for the Staff than just (possible trash) replies? Or, likes gotten in the update categories shouldn’t count towards the total likes in their profile (of course a Discourse feature).
Until then, I guess we just need to rely on DMs and flagging, which is not satisfactory but it’ll have to do.
Not sniping, but posting for the sake of it with a generic reply instead of genuine feedback. I’ve done it a few times in the past and sometimes I feel it’s behaviour like that which has made announcements anti-feedback. And it’s also coming back to bite me hard.
When I look at announcements now, my primary reason for posting is because I have a question or issue of some kind that I feel I want to raise. It’s just that it’s so hard to make out any signal because of all the noise and I feel like this is also why staff don’t often reply to our feedback on the threads. Without a clear path to dialogue with legitimate feedback, it’s just a pain to scroll through.
I would love to dialogue with other more experienced members of the community or staff about updates or the feedback I’m giving so I can continue to learn and improve the way I think about these things and how I provide feedback. Knowing that I’ve posted generic trash on announcements in the past, expecting not to make out any signal for feedback I have and lack of staff replies has just led me to stop posting on announcements altogether (or at least significantly, may happen once in a blue moon).
Please add this. I don’t want to see that “thanks this is cool” nonsense on announcements. I want replies to only have actual feedback on them. There needs to be an equal effort to flag or remove these posts and not discourage flagging appraisals*.
* IIRC at one point staff did discourage flagging appraisal posts. I can’t remember which, but an announcement had a lot of its appraisals flagged which was good but the announcement kept getting locked as a result.
I think this behavior should just be against the rules, be it through an explicit rule, or implicitly as part of another one. It not being forbidden seems to naturally lead users to being dishonest and greedy like this. You can pretend you’re being altruistic by using your post to raise feedback higher on the topic, but the reality remains that you’re just being rude to the people who posted in the first place, and likely misinterpreting, paraphrasing, or taking them out of context.
We should have a rule that explicitly states that editing your posts intentionally and persistently to encompass replies made by other users later in the thread is inappropriate.