(Note: I was discussing this idea with WebGL3D and this was what we came up with, I am just posting it here so I may have a reference.)
As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to own a deleted item again, if it is offsale, too expensive, etc. The delete button is not needed, and is only used primarily by hackers to delete your favourite items that you wear.
I am suggesting that Roblox adds a ‘Repurchase’ button where the buy button would normally go, so if your account is breached, and someone deletes your items, you can easily recover them just buy clicking the repurchase button.
I find this method to be the best solution in fixing this growing problem.
This is a much better solution than the one time restore, as with that, they don’t know if you traded the items off legitimately, deleted them, or who knows what else. With a repurchase button, that could easily solve solve deleted items. However, there’s still the problem of exploiters trading your items away if they’re limited.
While this feature would be handy in the case of mistakes, it certainly wouldn’t replace the one time restore in any capacity beyond enabling people to halfway recover from a second breach.
We also currently have no way to know what items we’ve purchased in the past apart from seeing them in our inventory. Once an item is no longer in your inventory, the catalog will no longer say you own the item (or ever owned it). Item ownership seems linked directly to presence in inventory.
So the solution is to allow restores in a more fair way (I.e. kid gets their account broken into every day vs I used my restore 10 years ago but can’t use it now because clearly I get hacked too often) or to prevent items from being deleted (just hide from inventory) in the first place…? Not some weird, hacky un-delete button.
That’s true, but this option is more likely to be implemented, and would be a good addition overall. In the long term I’d love to see a change to the restoration policy, but until then, it’s worth it to push for other, more minor changes that give me more security.
I don’t agree that this feature is any more likely to be implemented over a fleshed out restore system or another solution. Implementing a feature destined to become obsolete is a waste of time, and if time is going to be invested into this problem, it’s best spent working on the best solution.
This option has almost no chance of being implemented. It adds items potentially worth millions of Robux to a user’s inventory without any human oversight, so the amount of review that would go into this is insane – and if something did go wrong, the effect on the economy would be catastrophic.
Compared to storing a single field for items that control whether they’re displayed in the inventory or not, or a change to CS processes (no engineering work required!), this would definitely not be a first pick.
No, theres people who like having little items in their inventory, or say you buy a t shirt multiple times. If people want to delete their items, let them. If they want to add them back to their inventory, let them.
Don’t feel the term “repurchase” quite fits this post too well. From what I can tell that hiding from inventory stuff is what Younite’s asking for here.
A change in CS isn’t something I’d feel would be a very good solution. The fact that we have to rely on CS for regular items in the first place feels rather silly, and to increase the workload from a service they limit doesn’t seem like it’d help.
My first DevForum post waaay back in July '17 was actually to remove the delete button on Roblox-created catalog items, but there was the minority of users who used it in ways that weren’t malicious. Removing sponsored items they no longer wished for, or making it easier to reach items in their inventory due to having less to dig through.
That post came to the compromise of (a clunkier version of) this repurchase/hide feature. I’m personally on the boat of “Either of these would be good, but it’d be a lot easier to just remove that delete button already, and not introduce a complex system for hiding and restoring items.” Of those two use cases mentioned, the whole “making it easier to find items by having less items” situation could be resolved by having better systems to find the items you’re looking for, such as maybe a tagging system to sort your items by.
Going through with either solution, I feel that the restores by CS would have more room to be enhanced as well. Without needing to focus on regular items which the user may or may not have had, and the work behind restoring them all, they can shift that focus on giving a bit more room and flexibility with people who have their limiteds stolen.
We should just not be able to delete items. We can’t go and restore lots of stuff in the past, for various reasons, but we can at least stop issues being caused in the future.
I think if you need to delete items, it’s either because you want to hide something you made 10 years ago from the public (potential feature) or because you have too much stuff (potential feature request for search in inventory).
Item transactions, including purchases & deletions, could just be logged and rolled back by CS. It’s not a terribly complex problem, and a history would probably be fairly short for most users. They may have this already.
This would also stop people from purchasing items with your money in the event of an account breach, or at least allow easy, mostly verifiable reversals. Session ID would hopefully be linked to an IP/Browser pair to mostly determine whether the transaction was legitimate.
The root issue, however, that you seem to be battling here, is account hijacking. Enforcing better password security, using two-factor authentication once accounts reach a certain amount of value, etc. seem like better long-term approaches.
I’m suggesting a means to the end (transaction architecture to enable rollbacks & track unauthorized deletions/sells/buys), whereas you’re suggesting an end (a repurchase button).
Honestly, item deletion seems like an anti-feature to me; it seems like its only use would be law compliance (GDPR et al.). In general though, this problem extends beyond item deletion: any actions taken during a hijacking are unwanted, and they all need to be tracked and reversed.
I’m also not too convinced by an appeal to the current policy (your first point). We’re in a thread proposing changes. It’s not unreasonable to suggest other changes that might solve deeper, underlying issues.