Add Captcha to comments

Feature Requests Website Features
#4

There a captcha for groups?

#5

Added in the past week, yeah.

Stopped people from spamming and spamming the wall then leaving.

1 Like
#6

How do you activate it? I haven’t seen it on any groups

#7

I think it may be for NBC only? Go to a group on an alt and try to join it. If that’s the case, then I totally approve of captcha for NBC users.

2 Likes
#8

I am NBC

Have you yourself seen one? I saw an image floating around but Im debating its authenticity

#9

I figured out that it’s for NEW accounts only… made an account called NewAccountTest and this is what happened:

CAPTCHA for new account while joining group

2017-09-15_15-49-54

6 Likes
#10

They have a bunch of very smart and capable people working at Roblox. You can rest assured that they will decide the best course of action. The best course of action is not necessarily the one suggested most on the devforum.

If you have a look through the 20+ other discussions about captchas, you can see some further explanation on why staff have rejected this solution in the past. It reduces user-friendliness for legitimate users, and it is easy to get around by employing services that solve captchas for you for a low cost. It would not be a sustainable solution to the problem.

3 Likes
#11

It sure did seem to solve the group botting problem. :upside_down_face:

1 Like
#12

The thread is about “Add Captcha to comments”. Adding a captcha to group join is fine because this is an action that happens relatively infrequently for legitimate users. Comment/wall posting happens more frequently than this, so adding a captcha there would damage legitimate use more.

1 Like
#14

There is no captcha on group join. If group botting was solved, it was done through other means (e.g. restrictions on group joining for new accounts)

Attempting to join on an older account with default avatar/no verified email:
https://gfycat.com/CarefreeInfamousGlowworm

2 Likes
#15
3 Likes
#16

Give it a month and botting groups will resume as normal – the botters just need to adapt their tools to either reuse the horde of old accounts they’ve amassed or hold newly created accounts for some time before using them. We can keep increasing the duration, but eventually we may as well just do it permanently. I’m not sure if they will bother to pay for captcha solving services because group botting doesn’t seem very useful unlike something like phishing comments/PMs.

2 Likes
#17

Why not just turn on the captcha for all accounts? I don’t believe users would be joining groups fast enough for it to be a serious issue for them.

1 Like
#18

Agreed

2 Likes
#19

That’s probably what they’ll end up doing since botters will just use old accounts. ROBLOX didn’t do this initially because if it solves the botting problem by just adding captchas to new accounts, there’s no reason to negatively impact the user experience of everyone by enabling them globally – the only problem is that non-permenant captchas won’t solve the botting problem.

Even though captchas might solve group botting if enabled for all accounts, we should still look into better solutions because captchas are annoying, even if only encountered infrequently. Captchas are a naive solution – they’re the simplest approach but also have the worst downsides (bad user experience and can be worked around if sufficient demand). Better solutions exist that don’t impact user experience (as) negatively and can’t be worked around, e.g.

  • Stop putting emphasis on all members and instead on active/exemplary members
    • #members for a group could be replaced with a metric which gauged size of active community
    • List of members could be used to showcase members with most activity/achievements to encourage participation in the group and showcase your best members
    • This also makes the member list more useful since pages and pages of random users isn’t really valuable

or

  • Make entire member lists a backend moderation tool
    • Like with the server list, the group member list is able to be used to parse for users to send PMs to
    • The ability to jump to specific pages takes up more server resources and ROBLOX may already be inclined to remove this functionality
    • Instead we can show online members like Discord servers
    • Could also show first in-game, then in-Studio, then online like the friends list on the Home page
3 Likes
#20

Something’s gotta be done though, Roblox seriously cannot continue like this

2 Likes
#21

Yes, they can. They’re doing what they can - they’ve already said they can’t / are not in a position to add Captchas to the site right now. Personally, I hate Google’s NoCaptcha ReCaptcha – it always sends me to the “select all matching cars” and then denies me anyway.

2 Likes
#22

Bots also seem to be smart enough to create accounts verified by email. :thinking:

#23

Yep – currently they do quite a bit of things to bypass preventative measures:

#24

Some steps to stop bots posting in your group.

  1. Add a new base rank with no comment permissions
    This stops bots from just joining and spamming.

  2. Make a group place where completing its obby + questionnaire correctly (bot proof) or simply just joining (prob. not bot proof) will give you a promotion to the next rank where the person will get comment permissions

    This is a way for your members to get their perms without much effort. It also filters out the more active members out of those who just join and never look again. If people can’t be bothered to get the super easy promotion, they should still have the permissions to see the group shout and etc so that they can still see your announcements.

  3. Make your group so that join requests must be manually accepted. Furthermore, use a bot to accept everyone except those on the blacklist. You can add people you don’t want + bots that get past this system to this blacklist.

This should work.