Hi Creators,
Starting today, if you are 17 and older, you can include strong language in 17+ experiences you create. This launch is part of our broader vision for Roblox to be for everyone by providing age-appropriate experiences and communication. So if you are building a terrifying horror experience age-gated for people 17 and older, when something scary jumps out of the shadows, your users could react as many folks would by yelling out an expletive in both text and voice chat, and it won’t be filtered or censored like in this post. With this launch, we will no longer apply consequences for using strong language in 17+ experiences in either text or voice chat.
This is available for 17+ experiences only, so you should still refrain from using strong language on DevForum and elsewhere on Roblox.
What is Strong Language?
We define strong language as vulgar and obscene language that is not used to harass, discriminate, incite violence, or threaten others, or used in a sexual context. While we are providing an option to relax our text filters for 17+ experiences and removing consequences for using strong language in text and voice chat in those experiences, you must still comply with our Community Standards and Roblox’s 17+ Policy Standards. We want Roblox to be welcoming, which means it’s okay for you to swear when among only 17+ users in 17+ age-appropriate experiences, provided that you aren’t violating our Community Standards. We will do our best to ensure that our revised text filters prevent harmful communication that violates our Community Standards; however, please let us know if you see anything you think should not be allowed using the Report feature.
To illustrate the difference between what is allowed with strong language and what violates our Community Standards, here’s an example:
You will be allowed to use strong language in a 17+ experience text or voice chat with this feature enabled. That said, targeting that language towards someone will be moderated as it is deemed bullying and/or harassment.
Enabling Strong Language in 17+ experiences
With this launch, you can enable strong language in experience content and/or user communications. Enabling strong language in a 17+ experience or converting an existing non-17+ experience to 17+ with strong language will require you and your collaborators to be 17+ and ID-verified.
As a reminder, all public-facing content for 17+ experiences must be appropriate for all ages (including but not limited to texts, thumbnails, and videos on experience details pages). So please refrain from including any strong language in those promotional materials.
Allowing Strong Language in User Communication
You can enable Strong Language in user communication for your 17+ experiences. In your 17+ experience, go to the Creator Dashboard > Audience > Communication Settings to enable the toggle for Allow Strong Language, which will relax the text filter settings and allow your users to use Strong Language without being hashed out.
Experiences with strong language will show “Contains Strong Language” on the experience details page.
Experiences that contain strong language will show an indicator of “Contains strong language” on the experience details page
We recommend including in-experience messaging to inform your users about strong language and encourage them to be civil and respectful, even while using strong language. We are also exploring ways to show in your experiences when strong language is enabled.
Depicting Strong Language in Content
To depict strong language content in your experience, your experience must first receive Experience Guidelines with an “Ages 17+” age recommendation and the Strong Language descriptor.
To do so, visit the Creator Dashboard and locate the Questionnaire tab for your experience. Generate Experience Guidelines for your experience by taking the questionnaire and selecting “Yes” when asked, “Do you depict strong language in your experience?”. Upon questionnaire submission, your experiences should receive an Ages 17+ age recommendation with the Strong Language descriptor.
Assets Can’t Include Strong Language
While our plan for strong language is to allow it in 17+ user communications and in experience content, please note we don’t yet support 17+ assets, so, for example, you won’t be able to upload an audio file or image depicting strong language. We’re working on supporting this in the future.
Similar to existing 17+ experiences, to depict more mature content, you can leverage existing non-17+ assets in creative ways to showcase strong language content in your experience.
Get started
We know many of you have been waiting for this for a long time, and we’re excited to see the types of experiences you build. Get started with the resources below and let us know if you have any feedback or questions!
Resources
FAQs
When will 17+ assets be available?
- We’re working on making our moderation system more dynamic. Historically, we only had the concept of assets pass or fail moderation. Going forward, we’re developing an asset classification system that will allow us more flexibility and help support the vision of 17+ assets.
Why is strong language only available in 17+ experiences? Didn’t the Creator Roadmap say it would be in 13+ experiences?
- When we launched Creator Roadmap in May, you may have seen that we had a roadmap item called “relaxed text filters,” which referred to 13+ experiences. Our priority is to roll out strong language in a way that prioritizes safety and civility. Therefore, we’re starting with 17+ ID-verified users.
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