As a Roblox content creator, it is currently too hard to report players from an experience after they have disconnected from the server.
A solution would be to report the player through the Roblox website, but this cannot be achieved unless you know the player’s username.
This becomes an issue if a player has a display name different from their username and the experience only/mostly uses player.DisplayName rather than player.UserName when referring to players in the server.
Consider this example:
This experience allows you to use your display name while speaking in the chat, but will notify the server chat when a player has disconnected from the server using the player’s username. If the experience did not notify me who disconnected via userame, I wouldn’t have known who said the message shown in the example as the player immediately left the server after saying it. As servers do not notify you who leaves a server by default, under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have known who said that.
Due to this, I would suggest a way players can report others players who have disconnected from a Roblox server. I had a solution in mind which was right-clicking on the displaynames/usernames of chatters on the default chat GUI to open the speaker’s playercard at any time as left-clicking will allow you to whisper to the player - if they’re in the server, under normal circumstances. I’m no software engineer, so I do not know if this can be achieved, but if it cannot be achieved, then I’d alternatively suggest implementing what the experience in my example did - notifying players of a server who has left the server via username, so that we can instead report the player through the Roblox website.
If this issue were to be addressed, it would prevent bad users from exploiting this report abuse feature loophole.
To add onto this, you lose the context to the messages that were inappropriate, so doing this is not a perfect solution.
Worth noting that the legacy chat entirely uses developer accessible functions so this wouldn’t be feasible for the legacy UI to implement without giving developers the ability to prompt a report / player-card of a player (which in all honesty probably should be a feature, but still it’s a bit risky). On top of this, many games disable the regular chat system in favour of their own chat system and some games have chat disabled entirely (chat is not the only reason for reporting)
If it’s a display name or username issue then moderators are given enough information if you were to report it on the website. I think the real problem would be chat related issues, as some people say a bypassed message and leave immediately.
However, how would they implement this feature? Would the options to report players also include the last 5 people who left or something?
If this were to be the case, I would like it to be time based rather than player count based, some people could make bots to make 5 different accounts leave after them, removing them from the report screen.
Perhaps implementing a system that allows reporting players that is sent to a game’s community moderators is a good approach to take here?
Fundamentally, a developer has to ensure that their experience complies with ToS; perhaps taking this further and tasking the developer with handling misconduct in-game would add an extra barrier before filing reports with ROBLOX staff?
This has its caveats:
A larger game would require an extensive moderation team
Player messages would have to be stored (unethical)
A developer would have to create a web API to handle reports
Potentially a community-driven framework could resolve this?
Subsequent reporting to ROBLOX staff would be an issue if a long period of time has elapsed
Potential for misunderstanding; which report button should a player click?
However, it has its advantages:
Alleviates pressure on ROBLOX moderation staff
Caters for dynamic, community-led rules compliant with ToS
Allows for (relatively) immediate response
Allows for the development of command-line software (/ bots) to handle remote moderation
It’s an unpolished idea. I imagine there is a use-case somewhere.
Yes, even when we do have the usernames but people would leave it because they don’t want to waste their time going to their profile. Some may forget their user name.
