What's Your Opinion On the Removal of Post Approval For the Resources Category?

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#1

So before I found and read threads about post approval removed from the resources category, I thought the post approval process was going bonkers. There was an unnecessary amount of useless threads, some of which are things any 1 day Roblox user not on the developer forum would know. For example, “learn how to play games on roblox”. Now the first thing is that their title doesn’t have a pleasing format. Normally, more proffesional threads would at least name it somewhat like, “Learn How to Play Games on Roblox”, with proper capitalization. And the threads would go something like this:

hello today im going to teach you how to enter game on roblox

  1. select game from game category
  2. click on game you want to play
  3. click the green button that should be on the bottom of your screen and if its not there it is probably a bug

thank you and make sure to like this tutorial if you like it

Obviously, I’m exaggerating, but, you get the point. Sometimes, people post things in the #resources category thinking it’s the right category to post in.

The #resources category was my favourite category, and because of this, I’m having doubts on whether or not the infamous #help-and-feedback:scripting-support category would be my favourite now. The #resources category was by far the most productive out of all the categories in my opinion, and now it has descended to a total chaos. Not only that, the activity of the category skyrocketed from 24 topics per week (I think), to ahem, SiXTy ThReE? This is insane! Three times as much, unacceptable.

Now what, instead of quietly browsing through the #resources category, I have to pick the needle out of the haystack. Threads that are actually good now have been overshadowed by the sheer amount of horrendous topics, and it’s probably going to go downhill from here if we don’t do anything about it.

Ultimately, I just want the old #resources category back.

What are your opinions?

3 Likes
Community Resources and Community Tutorials should require PA
[PSA] Common Practices that Shouldn't be Done on the Forums
#2

I agree that the quality has gone downhill in #resources, but I think the best way to combat this is to flag low effort posts.

If I had the power to(I don’t), I would probably restrict #resources to Regular only, like they did with #discussion.

5 Likes
#3

Yeah, I’m quite annoyed about threads being really low quality. What I noticed before, the #resources:community-resources and #resources:community-tutorials topics used to get a crap ton of likes, and views. Now a days, people are using these categories a lot because they want the same clout the other people got before. Now a days, I feel like people are just wanting likes more than anything which I find very sad.

I would do the exact thing. Most new members I’ve seen now a days have the least amount of professionalism. #resources was my hands down favorite category after the marketplace category was removed.

3 Likes
#4

I like the category too, of course. But, here’s my opinion:

Although the posts have gotten lower in quality, they have also been hidden very fast either by mods and/or community flags. So, it’s not like the good tutorials are clouded by the bad ones, because they really aren’t. Sure, some attention is stolen from them by the bad posts, but no one truly forgets about them purely because of their quality. To be honest, by the time I sleep and wake up the next morning, the bad posts are already dealt with (I know because I have notifications in those categories).

In the end, the PA and mods do have to swoop in to lock the threads. But, it’s only the bad posts they have to review, not all (which happens with PA).

What We Can Do:

Flag 'em! Whatever tutorial is misusing the category, you should report that topic. I like to think of it as the “Public Post Approval”. It’s less work for the actual PA team and the low-quality posts get filtered out very fast.

TL; DR

It’s not as bad as it seems. I disagree with your claim about the good posts being clouded by the low-quality ones. The only concerning problem is: when will it be clear to Members when to post in that category? When will they learn to use the category better? I just hope that one locked/reported post serves as a good example to about 100 Members (i.e. exponential growth, or decay technically).

3 Likes
#5

There are plenty of low quality posts that technically follow the guidelines of the channel. You see a lot of people posting very similar resources again and again, just slightly tweaked. I wouldn’t say it’s awful, but it’s definitely noticeably worse.

7 Likes
#6

I kinda like it, it lets me post tutorials in there without PA.

#7

I’m disappointed, to be honest. It used to be full of good stuff–to be fair, there still is a decent amount of good stuff, but it’s been buried underneath useless resources and duplicate tutorials. To repeat what I said in another thread, if you want to help keep the quality as high as possible, report anything that seems to be a duplicate of something else or of poor quality.

5 Likes
#8

I would not restrict it to regular only. Many large developers don’t use the DevForums. What if one joined it and wanted to open source their game in #resources but they couldn’t because it was restricted? I think restricting it would be quite a silly thing to do.

1 Like
#9

That’s the reason there is post approval, to make sure that new members can post there with some supervision.

2 Likes
#10

I know. Which is why restricting it to regular only would be stupid. Bring back post approval, don’t restrict it.

#11

They cannot bring back Post Approval due to the huge backlog they’re having:

1 Like
#12

If one way is blocked, use the other way: Flag them, flag them, flag them! Like most of the other people said!

Maybe they can add a “It’s useless/poor quality” and a “It’s duplicate” matter to the flagging page?

#13

Sages can usually get to these duplicate posts before moderators do from flagging. And the “it’s useless/poor quality” is kinda insulting.

#14

Oh, sorry for being mean/insulting.

#15

It’s really full of rubbish that shouldn’t be there.

It should be Regulars only - since the entire point of regular role is to prove someone can post without the need for post approval, and since post approval struggled with the backlog, restricting it to Regulars will have no ill effect.

2 Likes
#16

I agree with @EllipticCurve_DHE.

This is getting out of hand. Members keep posting not substantial enough topics and their topics are flagged. It’s a guaranteed chance that a Community Resource/Tutorial will be flagged every day.

#17

Honestly, for me, I have never once seen a bad topic in #resources category but I feel that the reason why PA was removed was because it would be too much workload for them. The PA team are made up of helpful people who are developers and being PA probably takes up a lot of their time and they can’t even focus on development(I’m just saying what I think they’re going true), so I think that this is a good step for the devforum to remove PA from #resources

#18

That’s exactly why:

#19

Post Approval could be removed on anything if they wanted to. I have no problem with this - just flag posts. The Post Approval team are full of volunteers - they don’t have to be doing this.