Earlier today, I was pinged that an application I maintain was not responding, and the logs showed it had to do with Roblox Open Cloud. I figured the key was expired, but when I went to go to the Roblox website, I was given a moderation warning for an asset I made in 2015. After confirming the warning, the application immediately became responsive again. This means that account moderation by Roblox can take down an application reliant on Open Cloud for something as simple as a warning. This could also lead to a game of a warned/banned account being online but broken because it relies on a service using Open Cloud.
For my case, me being warned knocked out Innovation Security’s moderation tools, which relied on Open Cloud Data Stores. While I don’t own the group, I set up the API key. It has access to Data Stores and MessagingService, although no requests went through the MessagingService since Data Stores were failing first.
Expected behavior
For a non-termination action, I expect any applications using my Open Cloud API to still function.
I’d actually bet it isn’t intended, but wasn’t unintended either; just a combination that wasn’t planned for. Games aren’t taken down when the owner is banned (well, unless they are the reason for the ban), so I don’t see why Open Cloud-based applications must go offline.
Open Cloud services use API keys to provide access. Regardless, even if an account is moderated, especially for a group non-owner, I don’t expect my services to unexpectedly go down because of it when the games are still accessible.
Unfortunately there’s a lot of work that needs to happen here before we can improve this. Internally the Roblox systems make some assumptions that make it difficult to disambiguate being warned from being banned. We also lack the systems to set up per-feature level punishments rather than whole-account level punishments.
I can’t give a timeline here, but can say we’re thinking about some approaches on how to alleviate this so that certain actions (like Open Cloud usage) don’t need to be blocked when you’re being warned or when you incur an infraction in an unrelated part of the platform.
It’s intentional in that we inherited the default behavior of Roblox API. It is not an intentional design decision of Open Cloud and so we can revisit.
Moving to #feature-requests:website-features from Engine Bugs for clarity as this exceeds the definition of a bug report (not something we can quickly address, requires fundamental changes).