Trust & Safety is of the utmost importance to the Creator Marketplace team, and we continue to explore new ways to support this goal. ID verification is a method that helps us protect the community from bot accounts and ensure that asset creators are real people. We are excited to announce a set of changes today that will expand upon that system to make our ecosystem safer.
More Ways to Verify your Account
Until now, asset creators could verify their accounts via ID upload. With today’s change, creators can use either phone verification or ID verification to verify their account for the marketplace. This was a common request from many who were unable to verify their accounts using an ID and will make features such as discoverability and increased rate limits more accessible to the community. You can find instructions on how to verify your account here.
Content from Verified Creators by Default
Last December, we announced an easier way to identify content from real people via an ID-verified badge. Starting today, Marketplace will only expose assets from creators who are ID or phone verified by default. This change will improve safety and accountability for all Marketplace users. If you are newly ID or phone verified, please note that there will be a short delay before your assets appear in the revamped Marketplace default. Marketplace users will still have the ability to include assets from unverified creators from the options menu, but this option is more likely to expose you to potentially harmful assets.
Safety will always be a top priority for Roblox, and we will continue to invest heavily in these initiatives. We look forward to making more improvements in the coming months! Huge shoutout to the team that made this happen: @Sourdough_Sam, @Nosniv42, @FriendlyAdder, @applepinecake
Checkmarks/verification badges should only be given to trusted developers. Even if you upload your ID, you can still put a virus in your model, and anyone who sees scripts will think. “Hey, this guy has a little checkmark next to his name, I think these scripts will be fine.” This is specifically unhelpful to smaller developers, who sometimes rely on some free models to create their games. I’m not saying everything is a free model, but safety on the Marketplace should be taken seriously.
I understand what you guys want to do, but this is not the right direction, this is the exact same thing with the Talent hub. Creators should not just be “verified” and have a checkmark if they have an ID. It deceives creators, and people who want to hire creators into thinking they are trusted developers in the community, and they have a lower chance of scamming you.
Same with this update. It deceives developers into thinking these are trusted people, and you can use their models. Which is not true, and is a wrong assumption.
Yes, if they have an ID you can identify them easier and ban them, but so what? They increased risk may go down, but it’s not going to go down much.
Anywho, you went in the right direction, but this is not the way to do it.
This was a very much-needed addition to the verification system.
With that being said, I am a bit concerning about SIM swapping. This increases the damage dealt by attackers because they can upload virus-filled models and have them show up in the Marketplace as verified, leading developers to believe they are safe.
This is definitely a great change. I love to see Roblox trying to make the marketplace a safer place for aspiring and current developers.
I do however have a question which I hope someone at Roblox will be able to answer and look into.
Last year a few of us had a meeting with Roblox’s moderation team to help them identify improvements that needed to be made to the system. The biggest gripe myself and many others had was that Roblox was punishing users (extreme punishments such as account termination) for having free models in their experiences which went against Roblox’s TOS.
In many of these cases, the games which contained these free models had no players at all. I know from experience as this has happened to many friends of mine.
Will Roblox ever implement a system to identify content from a free model that goes against TOS and punish the creator of the free model, rather than punishing the player?
A system like this isn’t actually hard to implement either. You simply compare content added to a game with content in the game and any matches will be your free model content.
I hope someone at Roblox sees this and is willing to help fix this major issue.
Thank you so much for not forcing us to hand over ID now.
But, looking at this, despite previous criticisms, this isn’t exactly the best solution if we’re talking about the real purpose of this ‘to trust someone’. What’s stopping someone from just using Talkatone or Google Voice numbers?
Either way, the verified badge is still incredibly misleading, and I believe we should have a badge for trusted developers instead.
I am all for giving users multiple ways to verify their accounts for restricted features. Phone verification seems more than enough for voice features, as an example.
This marketplace improvement, however, seems like a terrible idea. Adding a badge insinuates a level of trustworthiness that is frankly too easy to bypass.
While requiring a phone number will dramatically reduce how many bots and bad actors will upload to the marketplace, it will not eliminate the problem. There are a hundred places to purchase throwaway phone numbers. Legal or not, bad actors don’t care.
I am concerned that having any sort of badge will legitimize and signal boost fraudulent and real creators alike.
More could have been done to encourage creators to adopt ID verification while ensuring the platform is safer for all.
This is an excellent improvement (besides the whole badge thing) for many 13+ creators since phone number verification is often more trusted (and used by more companies if I’m not mistaken) than ID verification.
One question,
Will we eventually be able to get 100 audio uploads a month with phone number verification?
I love the ID verification change so people can now ID verification however like many people have said about the icon thing for ID verified developers, I have to agree with. There are lots of people who I think may not hover over the button and just think the user is verified by Roblox directly and are all good modals/assets.
Well, this can be misleading for many of the young people out there, considering verifying yourself is this easy (just by a phone number).
Verified assets are supposed to assure people that there is no malicious content within the asset however if someone adds malicious content and verifies their account via a phone and it’ll just be listed there as some kind of a trusted asset.
I personally don’t see an issue with the badge/checkmark showing up for everyone who verifies, it isn’t a secret what it’s meant for and you can find out easily, which kinda gets rid of that confusion. Other platforms, like facebook, have easy to obtain verification checkmark/badges as well, but they have various types of checkmarks that mean different things.
Albeit I don’t develop much anymore, this is a great improvement and extremely helpful!
I feel like there could be at least some sort of distinction between those who ID verified and those who phone verified, phone verification is way easier to abuse (via throw-away phone number services) and as such I personally would trust those assets less, it doesn’t need to be a full-on filter, just some way to distinguish the 2 would be nice.
The difference is that when Roblox bans that user, they ban them for good. The user can’t just hop on another account and upload the exact same thing again.
This is definitely a necessary change for a better marketplace. I really hope searching the marketplace safely for assets created by groups and not only users is on the roadmap too.
