Its no secret how bad the ROBLOX catalog is when it comes to shirts and pants. Tons of copies and irrelevant items show up when you try to search for an item. I look for assets to use on zombies for my game, and it is sometimes a very annoying process. For players spending robux to improve their character I believe it should be better optimized.
What’s the fix? Simply stop using descriptions for the search engine.
Since the beginning of the website people just add tags to the description so their items show up in every possible search.
The year is 2021, I believe it is finally time to address the catalog more. By making this change searches will be far more relevant. Players who want a specific shirt will find it much easier to find what they are actually searching for rather than a totally irrelevant asset that just uses the “tag” system to show up in any search.
I don’t think there is much argument as to why descriptions should be used in the search engine, this minor change could greatly improve the catalog.
descriptions are still very useful to find certain items in the catalog. I agree that they should remove them at least for clothing assets, since those are the items that are abusing the tag system.
Any improvements that weaken abusers/copiers are great in my mind coming from someone who got their clothing stolen so many times that I quit making clothing all together. I think roblox gave up on the clothing section of the catalog a long time ago though.
I’m still holding out hope that someone at roblox will read this and take the initiative.
Historically, search has always taken account of descriptions. i.e Youtube or any other video-based platform. If you took out descriptions, you’d be forced to query based on the title of the clothing piece when everything is essentially named the same. I don’t think people want excessively long titles to compensate.
Let’s say we were radical – To get rid of the clothing store or to trace back to the original clothing piece is a complicated, tedious and pretty much impossible feat. It’s not completely impossible but, it’s a technical challenge and one that is very costly. In addition, you’d have to refund a bunch of people for the clothing they bought that was copied and no longer exists. Something that I highly doubt Roblox would be willing to do.
It totally sucks for anyone who likes to make clothing but, that’s how it is in the real world. You make a product. It may or may not be overly successful. If it is successful, you’ll see copycats out in the same market. Most of the time copycats are barely visible to the consumers at a certain price range due to cheap prices, brand familiarity and consumer loyalty. On Roblox, that may or may not be a thing since most kids don’t really care. I think it’s just an issue everyone has to deal with until some sort of super cool AI bot overlord deems otherwise.
I agree with what you said about why descriptions are needed but why not just make it search a handful of words instead of the entire description? There are definitely ways to still prevent these from being successful.
