I don’t want to obligate the staff to do anything, so keep in mind that this is just something that is probable – not something that is 100% guaranteed to happen. On this thread, it was mentioned that we might be switching to Discourse in the next couple of weeks. Here’s why you should be excited:
[size=5]1) Post flagging[/size]
Currently for this forum software, the only way to get bad posts removed is to report them. Reports have to be manually handled by a staff member, so this means that during the weekend and downtime when they’re sleeping, it’s impossible to get bad posts removed. Even when they’re on the forums, reports aren’t handled instantly, so it may be an hour or more before a bad post gets taken down, and by that point the thread has already been derailed. It’s not the staff’s fault – they’re not robots and can’t spend all of their waking hours monitoring the forum.
Discourse’s flagging is a bit different though – it’s mostly automatic. When enough users flag a post for the same offense (by default it’s 3, but ROBLOX might modify that) it’s automatically hidden from the discussion. Whether it be a weekend, 4 AM, or if ROBLOX’s entire staff took a year-long vacation, once a post gets 3 identical flags from different users, it’s hidden. This will enable us to quickly kill posts that could quickly derail threads.
Once a post has been hidden, the poster can edit it and have it automatically unhidden. If the post does not get flagged again, the poster is refunded the trust points they lost (no change in their trust), and the flaggers gain trust points (more on these later) – this will be the most optimal case because the moderators don’t have to get involved and we can gradually condition each other to be more constructive. If the poster chooses not to edit the post, it remains hidden and the trust they lost is not refunded (flaggers will not gain any trust though). If the poster edits and it’s hidden again, they are no longer able to edit it and a moderator will step in. If the flaggers are in the right, the poster’s trust level will be severely damaged and the flaggers gain a bit of trust. If the flags are unjust, the flaggers are severely penalized and the poster gains back what trust he lost plus a little more. Moderators can also defer flags and nothing changes and the post remains hidden. Posts hidden for over 30 consecutive days are automatically deleted.
[size=5]2) Trust level[/size]
Trust level is like an automatic leveling system. It measures how trustworthy users are so you can assign them different privileges. For instance, you wouldn’t want a brand new user to be able to move threads to different categories because you have no clue whether or not they’re trustworthy yet. On the other hand, a community figurehead is pretty likely able to handle that kind of privilege and use it to contribute to the quality of the forum. You can find an in-depth explanation of the permissions associated with trust levels here, but the gist of it is that new users won’t be able to cause much trouble and the maximum level you can get automatically can recategorize/rename topics and flag trust-level-0 users’ posts and have action immediately taken. There is also a level the staff can manually promote you to where you can edit all posts, pin topics, close/archive topics, split/merge topics, and remove a topic from the thread list. I’m not sure if they’d use that at all, but it exists. If your trust level gets too low (i.e. too many of your posts are flagged), you will automatically get the boot, which means it will be easier to remove poisonous people from the forum.
[size=5]3) Built-in tracking/muting settings[/size]
You can automatically watch/track/mute threads by category, as well as mute specific users where you won’t get notifications from them. Muted threads / threads by users you’ve muted will not appear in the discussion list.
[size=5]4) Better PM stuff[/size]
Most importantly, PM notifications are actually noticeable!
PMs are kind of like threads, so you can have group PMs, watch them (notified of every message), track them (notified only of messages that mention / reply to you), or mute them. That being said, you can also flag and do other stuff you’d normally be able to do to posts. With the way Discourse does notifications, you can get them through your browser and email in addition to getting them at the top of the page.
[size=5]5) The thank you system is not being outright removed[/size]
While I don’t believe ROBLOX will port existing thank yous (not that it matters), Discourse does still have a like system. You will still be able to endorse posts you find helpful. Discourse is a little unique in the fact that it has a limit on how many posts you can like per day though (this increases with trust level). Since upvote fairies (people who thank every post) have never been an issue here, ROBLOX may remove the restriction – I’m not sure.
On a side note, you can revert thanks (likes) so there won’t be any more accidentally thanking posts and not being able to undo it!
[size=5]6) Signatures will be replaced with something better[/size]
If you have the same user post more than once in a thread, you have their signature displayed for every post. It’s the same for every post, so it’s unnecessary to display it more than once, but it is. On top of that, we have people here who use gifs in their signatures (can be distracting / slow to load on mobile) and people who decide to upload signature banners that are larger than the horizontal space of the page (I’ve had to manually adblock quite a few of these since they push the reply/etc buttons off of the page). Discourse removes signatures and as you can see in the image above introduces something called a “user card”. You can upload your own background for that to personalize it (those of you who use their signatures to show off their own game can upload an image related to your game), and each account has a blurb that’s partially displayed on the user card (you can include URLs in it). I find that this is a much better alternative to signatures since they aren’t duplicated throughout the page. User cards show up whenever you click someone’s name.
[size=5]7) Discourse saves drafts of your posts[/size]
I’ve had a couple instances on the developer forums where I’ve accidentally clicked an image in the preview pane / exited out of the tab I was drafting a post in and then everything I wrote was lost forever. Discourse saves what you’re typing, so you won’t lose your work. Just now I forgot I wasn’t signed into Discourse on the second account I used to check out PMs while in the middle of typing a PM, I signed in at the top of the page, the page refreshed, and my PM was still there and not lost. You can navigate anywhere on the site while drafting a new post instead of opening new tabs, and the bottom pane where you’re typing your post will still be there.
[size=5]8) Better poll system[/size]
The poster (polls can be in any post – it doesn’t have to be the OP) can open/close polls at will too. If you want to know the forum syntax for them, here’s a page about that
[size=5]9) Better control over posts[/size]
Currently with Kunena, you’re not (officially) able to delete every post – only the latest post in the thread. With Discourse, you can delete any post (i.e. you realized you were behaving poorly and want to delete your off-topic posts on your own without forcing other users to flag them for you). Discourse will still show that you posted something, but it will say the post was withdrawn by the author. Users can still flag posts at this point in case someone is repeatedly drive-by insulting people and then deleting their posts.
Also, with Discourse, we can still use bbcode, but the primary forum syntax is markdown. It gives you more options on the formatting of your posts than bbcode does.
[size=5]10) If we handle this well, we might very well see the normal forums ported to Discourse[/size]
Discourse and its community-driven maintenance of the forums makes it easier for the staff to moderate the forum. They don’t have to jump in as often because of community flagging, automatic booting of bad people, etc and combined with the trust levels it would probably be an excellent replacement for the current forums, something that’s long due for an upgrade.
If you want to try out Discourse and get a feel for it, they have a sandbox up here.
