I am not a fan of the post approval system. Its slow, clunky, and the criteria for your post to be approved is far too subjective. However, an issue entirely separate from all that is that is that when you finally get your post approved, it will post buried under several other posts.
Two day turn around is a fairly standard time period if you have a good post approver and minimal issues with your post. This means that when your post is finally made public, it will appear underneath any post that has been made or had comments made on during the time your post was being approved.
In the case of my most recent tutorial, it was already buried under 6 other posts when it was first approved. And this is a reasonably good outcome, it can take upwards of a week for a post to be approved, which means your post will appear 12 posts down before anyone had a chance to read it.
While I am not making these tutorials for the exposure, its super frustrating that I invest several hours writing up a tutorial or other piece of writing only to have it get a couple dozen clicks, seemingly because of this issue.
Edit: After writing this I realized my tutorial was missing tags, so I added them. This apparently counts as updating your activity which resulted in it being bumped to the top. In the 8 hours it was up it had got 22 views. In the last 10 minutes it has received 5 more, so position clearly makes a difference to how your post is viewed.
This was also an issue I was experiencing back then when I was still a new member, however it shouldn’t really be problem. People will eventually find your post and if they find it interesting, they will post replies which should bring it to the top if that’s your main concern.
I also believe that if you edit your post (lets say add a tiny addition), your post will be brought to the top of the other posts.
This is a limitation with vanilla discourse functionality. Currently topics are split from bulletin board into the destination category. We cannot create a new topic for the user.
New tools are being worked on which will resolve the issue. They will allow us to pass requests through by either creating a new topic or resetting the bump date automatically.
Note, outside of exposure, there isn’t a big impact. Engineers get notified of new Platform feedback topics. Regardless of the date these topics are seen by the relevant people.
Im not good with website scraping so I cant exactly prove this, but based on my analysis of the community tutorials, the quality of the topic is one of the least important factors to do with how much attention a topic gets. Instead, the rank of the poster and or how well they are known in the community is a far better indicator.
I won’t lie and say that how many views a post gets means nothing to me, but that is secondary to getting feedback. However, as a “New Member” the only reply’s you really get are if you have made a oversight in your post that a user wants to correct. As “New Members” are already playing with a deck stacked against them, having yet another handy cap makes it all the harder to get that kind of feedback.
Im glad to here that a solution is being worked on though. As a temporary solution, it would be nice if the post moved reply you get when your post is moved contained a suggestion to add tags to your topic inorder to “bump” the post.
If it’s about new topics, I’m currently working on fixing that. It’s been a bit slow because everything about post approval is voluntary (also maintaining and developing the plugins) so I have to fit it into my already-busy life, but this should be coming in about 2ish weeks. Then we won’t need Bulletin Board for post approval anymore, and your topics will appear with the timestamp that it was approved at rather than when you requested it.
Regarding this: unfortunately it can’t be objective, because there’s humans involved, so this will always be the case. Sorry for any inconveniences. Please bring up any specific issues with the post approval member who handled your request (or anonymously with @Community_Sage), so that we can keep teaching ourselves/people to do better.
Its referring to topics, not posts, sorry for any confusion.
There will always be some degree of subjectivity. However as it stands, a PA can refuse a post for whatever reason they desire. Your post can meet all the rules, be free of grammar and spelling mistakes, and be formatted legibly, and still be declined. I as a user have no way of knowing if my post will be considered acceptable until I post it and get it approved or denied. And worse, A post that meets the demands of one PA may not meet the demands of a second PA, and there is no gaurentee that you will be getting the same PA, even on a single topic. You can’t even use prior posts in the category to see if your post is suitable, as PAs will ding you for things that full members can get away with.
When I make a new topic, I will generally write it in short spurts over the course of 1-3 days to allow time for spotting of any errors or chances for better ideas to come into my head. To not know if I have spent that much time only to have my post declined is unbelievably frustrating. To date, I have a 50% success rate of getting my topics published, and zero of them have broken any rules.
The moderation team is also run by humans, but unlike the PA team, I have a fairly good idea when I make a post if I have to worry about it being moderated. That is because there are objective standards (rules) I can hold my post to to see if it conforms. There is no code of conduct or standard for post approval though.
As mentioned, please send feedback on specific instances (with links/quotes and why you thought it was not great) to @Community_Sage so we have a record on it, otherwise we can’t teach people to improve and we might miss bad instances (because not all requests are seen by all people since there are too many).
I strongly suspect that most community sages will rule with the reasoning of the PA, so I don’t really want to waste more of the PA/CSs time (which as stated is fully volunteer) with something that is unlikely to get anything done.
The issue is less with the rulings of the PAs, and more to do with the lack of rules. Do I agree that a topic suggesting training AI to detect bot spam should be refused on the grounds that roblox engineers already know that spam bots are a issue? No, but I can understand and respect the reasoning behind that decision. Is there any way for me to know in advance that that topic would be blocked so I dont spend several hours writing it? Also no. There seem to be plenty of other posts suggesting ways to deal with different types of moderation issues so I cant even use historical precedent to know.
Is blocking a post that does not break any rules a violation of a PAs power? IDK, there is zero documentation regarding that. As a user do you have the right to say “I understand what you want, but I feel it would have a negative effect on my post, and my post does not break any rules and if I were a full member the post would not be moderated so please post it anyways”? I presume not.
I would encourage you to still give us this feedback because otherwise there is no opportunity for us to improve this procedure / explain better to you why something was performed a certain way to at least take away some of the frustration.
One important thing to realise that it is also a quality and appropriateness check, not just whether it ticks all the boxes of the forum rules. Every post approval member has a lot of experience posting and reading stuff on the forum, so they tend to have a good idea of the kind of stuff that is appropriate for a specific category.
Of course you can say that. You can give feedback on feedback given to you in the post approval request. You should always say what is on your mind and give feedback when you have any, so that you can get an explanation back on why the post approval member thinks a certain way about your post, or so we can re-evaluate the stance on the post.
(I have to note here though for completeness that it doesn’t mean any suggested edit can be overturned by objecting against it – it’s also important to take some feedback to heart and realize that the feedback comes from experienced posters on the forum, and it is meant to teach you to write better posts. If any feedback is not clear, always ask for clarification.)
Without commenting on anything else (Thomas has done a great job on communicating what my thoughts would be), it’s worth noting that just because full members do things doesn’t mean it’s recommended or allowed. We’re in contact with DevRel about how threads should be formatted and what information they should contain, and try to get new members to follow those suggestions as best we can. A majority of full fledged members never went through post approval and are used to more lax formatting guidelines for categories (it is only relatively recently that guidelines have started to be so strict) so the quality of their posts vary drastically. Were a full member to put a post through PA, we would treat it the same way we do every post. They just don’t have to, for better or for worse.
Note: I for the purpose of discussions prior I have been conflating the guidelines with rules.
Big difference between recommended and allowed. Presumably if a post is not allowed, it would be moderated.
While frustrating to deal with, formatting is less of a concern (I had a PA ask me to use headers in a post that had no titles, which would of resulted in just everything having the header effect and when I explained this to them, they removed that requirement). Still, a style guide which shows exactly how a post should be structured would be greatly appreciated so when a PA tells you your post needs bolding and headers, you actually know what the heck they are talking about (and presumably they don’t even need to ask you to do that because you have already followed the style guide).
A bigger concern is when you post a bug report pertaining to Roblox’s discobot tutorial which is declined because Roblox does not manage discobot so you should post this on discourses official forum instead, which posts about similar (but distinctly different for the purpose of bug reports) issues with discobot already exist on the forum.
Very well, I will. However, this completely sidesteps my main issue, which is that I have no way of knowing if my topic will be approved until I actually submit it for approval. Even if I was to fully understand all the nuances of the moderation system by “Trial and error”, that does little to help all the other new members who are likely also frustrated with the complete lack of transparency.
If your not going to hold full members to the same standard of quality and appropriateness, why bother holding New Members to it? And if you cannot express the standard in the form of rules, is it even worth having that standard that may or may not be enforced depending on the PA you get? Im of the opinion rules serve two purposes. A- to clearly tell people what they can and cannot do, but also B- Tell people the scope of power those who enforce the rules have. As it stands, the rules as they are fulfill neither objective.
This is a little bit more complicated than you’re making it out to be. A large portion of people in the member trust level were here from when forum membership was based on developer skill rather than just participation in the community. Yes, ideally everyone should have the same standard when posting in Platform Feedback and other restricted categories. Yes, some people that are full member do post bad bug reports. We’d ideally want newer members to do better than that, which is why post approval exists.
If everyone on this forum would have had to go through the post approval system to be a member, we wouldn’t have this problem of seemingly judging things with two standards, but that’s just not the way it is because this forum has a long legacy.
You can subsequently continue in two ways: either you set a good enough standard going forward so that the signal-to-noise ratio is high and feedback is easy to process for Roblox staff, or you just say “screw it” and let all the reigns loose and risk that engineers become desensitized to the forum because of the low quality of feedback. (engineers get notifications of topics, so taking them down after the fact would mean those notifications become more noisy still, so less participation from staff in the long run) We think the former is better and that is what we are going with right now.
Moreover, we want your topics to be addressed, so the standard is also a means to make sure that your issue is addressed or taken into consideration as likely/timely as possible after it is approved. Even if a member is able to post a lower quality bug report or feature requests because they didn’t have to pass post approval, that doesn’t mean their thread is likely to be taken into consideration over a request/issue that has more thought and detail put into it.
Again, if any particular example seems worrying, please bring it up privately so that we are aware and can judge whether that was done right. We don’t want the process to be frustrating.
This is based on the presumption that New Members will maintain the same quality of posts once they become full members. I believe that this presumption is wrong. It also completely misses And if you cannot express the standard in the form of rules, is it even worth having that standard that may or may not be enforced depending on the PA you get? but that is of secondary importance.
Because you have failed to provide a standard to judge against, the post approval process is entirely subjective. So instead of approaching Post Approval with the mindset of “How can I make my post better conform to the standards” I instead approach it with a mindset of “What is this PA going to make me do so I can post my topic I posted”.
To provide a (hopefully decent) example, would you have much respect for a police officer who ordered (not asks) you to do things, even if you were not breaking the law? Even if that officer was only acting on the best of intentions, I would find that an abuse of power and largely ignore the rules when he is not a threat. However, if a police officer suggest that you do something, I would be far more likely to take it to heart. Likewise if a Police officer informs you that you are violating a rule, I would try to follow that rule.
Even though the PA team has the authority to order me to do whatever they want if I want my post to be approved, I am not going to care what they have said once I get full member privileges because the rules are arbitrary. However if a rule is codified, I will do my best to adhere to it, even if I disagree with it, simply because its not arbitrary.
If maintaining the quality of posts in these topics of such great concern, I would suggest roblox putting a lot more effort in making there guidelines for posting in these topics as clear as possible.