We need an FAQ and/or introduction for new members

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#1

I’m sure you’ve all seen a lot of duplicate post recently - a prime example being the questions about profiles pictures.

Currently we need to tell every single new member individually about features like search and the answers to common questions like the profile.

This isn’t that great, and doesn’t really fix the issue as long as we have new members coming in.

The rules - while good in general - aren’t that great for new members. We need something a little more friendly for newer members, and to give them some answers to quick questions.

The fact that younger people are also kind of blown away by walls of text and are generally more immature than older people needs to be considered also.

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#2

Yeah, I had someone earlier message me about the (post withdrawn by author…) stuff. An introduction thread would be nice.

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#3

We actually do have a pinned introduction thread. We have a users’ guide as well, but that’s more for how to use markdown/etc than how to use the forum. IIRC those threads are included in the email to new users letting them know they’ve been accepted, but that email is just a dump of like 8 URLs.

We should provide the FAQ/better email of course, but I’m not sure if that would entirely solve the problem. Not only are younger developers hesitant to read walls of text as mentioned in the OP, but sometimes they don’t like reading in general. I’m wondering if we would have more success by giving trial users access to more categories, but manually approving their posts so we can walk them through the process. What do you guys think?

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#4

I think manually approving the post is a good idea, because there are in some topics I’d like to post in Tutorials or Public section, and having that ability to at least get it reviewed and critiqued by an experienced person to help me along the way would be great!

I fully support this.

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#5

Yeah, that sounds better.

An email wouldn’t be that great as it’s harder to access. Especially considering how much people forget their details.

We’d probably need to assign a role to certain people allowed to moderate these and create a new category.
Is the latter even supported by Discourse?

#6

If by create a new category, you mean a category for threads to be posted while they await approval, that won’t be necessary. Manual post approval is supported by Discourse, so more than likely users post threads as normal in the category they’d like, but it just doesn’t become visible until reviewed.

We could probably just move this under the umbrella of the Top Contributor program since helping users get acclimated to the forum is our job. We’re probably the first to see the threads anyway.

@Nightgaladeld @Lilly_S @buildthomas Opinions?

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#7

You guys are good, but what about when you are sleeping? There are only two of you, and theoretically hundreds of basic users.

I think some extra manpower would be needed, at least to get stuff quickly seen :wink:

#8

Buildthomas and I are on different continents, so collectively we cover a lot of time due to timezones. My latest post yesterday was 16 hours ago, with buildthomas’ earliest post being 12 hours ago for a 4 hour gap.

You’re right that there would still be some period of delay, but during the times we’re asleep, so is most of the forum – the threads are unlikely to get a lot of attention until the morning anyway. Not that many trial users are posting during that time either. The Top Contributor program can always expand as needed though.

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#9

Manually approving posts is a great idea, plus if someone gets hacked and decides to post on the forums, it’ll be detected

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#10

Thanks for posting this feedback. We currently have plans to release a new “About Basic Users” thread which goes into the full details of the program and as well as revamping the current email the basic users role set receives.

Based on the feedback posted here, we added additional clarifications to the rules on how New Members can post bug reports. It can be viewed here - Official Rules of the Roblox Developer Forum

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