This is the Steam comments section on games:
This is on a popular game that just got released (Civilization VI). On ROBLOX, the comments section would be flooded with thousands of scam-spam comments.
I don’t see any spam. I see well-written, helpful reviews, even though there’s just as much incentive to scam people out of items on Steam as there is on ROBLOX. There is real money involved on that platform as well, and you could use a bunch of stolen cheap items to build up your steam funds, buy more expensive items and then sell them way below their Steam price on a “black market” of sorts and earn real money. The incentive to scam is there, but comments don’t seem to be a viable way to go about this. Why is that?
Using bots to spam comments isn’t much more difficult.You have to get past a verified email and you also need to allow a device to access the account. Once you have that, your bot can spam comments all day until your account gets banned.
The issue that you’d face then is that even if you can get someone’s login details, you need to be able to get into their email to authenticate your device. This is a one-time thing. Once you’ve authenticated the device, you don’t ever have to do it again for that device, so a simple username/password combination wouldn’t get you anywhere if you managed to trick someone into giving you it.
I’m not saying this should be done exactly the same way on ROBLOX, but if it were a requirement to make trades with people or buy items from users that aren’t ROBLOX on a verified device, scamming people would be much less viable than it is now, because you’ll need access to their E-Mail account as well as their ROBLOX account in order to steal from them.
Then, you can actually make good reviews because there isn’t a 200 character limit. 200 characters isn’t enough to say anything constructive at all, so no one ever posts constructive comments on ROBLOX in the first place, because it’s impossible.
And finally, they have a system where you can up/down-vote comments. Very helpful comments will naturally rise to the top and spam comments will naturally fall to the bottom. Yes, this would make it difficult to see newer comments, but as you can see, Steam solved it by showing the most recent comments in a ‘secondary’ comments section for new comments - and as you can see, there isn’t really much spam in that section either, because it’s not viable to spam on that platform.
I agree that a Captcha wouldn’t be a good solution to the problem, so why don’t we look at other platforms that have gotten it right and take ideas from there?
EDIT: Also, Steam doesn’t allow newly authenticated devices to trade, change passwords, etc. so even if the E-mail account was compromised, the owner of the account would have time to act upon their account being compromised. Furthermore, Steam sends you an E-mail whenever a new device was authenticated so you always have a way of knowing someone got in. If we had such a system on ROBLOX, scamming wouldn’t be nearly as viable anymore.
