Age Checks to Access Chat, Studio Team Create, and Links on Roblox

Updates Announcements
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[Update] November 18, 2025

Hi Creators,

Our top priority is keeping our community safe, and we’re going further to unlock chat and age-appropriate experiences for our users by requiring them to complete an age check through Facial Age Estimation or ID verification.

Once the age check is complete, users will only be allowed to chat with others in similar age groups, unless they become Trusted Connections with people they know. We’re also adding age check requirements early next year for the Team Create Collaborate feature in Studio and social media links.

We know that this is a significant shift, so we want to provide you with details on the required changes, timing, and how you can prepare. We’ve included answers to some of the most commonly asked questions from our last update at the bottom of this post.

Age Checks to Chat on Roblox

Age checks will become a requirement to access chat starting the first week of December in select countries (Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand) and will roll out globally where chat is available early next year. Importantly, since our last update, we’ve changed our implementation of Persona’s Facial Age Estimation technology, and images and video for all age checks are deleted immediately after the check is processed and complete.

Requiring age checks allows us to implement age-based chat, which helps users better understand who they’re communicating with and limits chat between minors and adults. For more information and details on how age-based chat works, view our Newsroom.

Tools to Manage the Chat Transition

New Custom Matchmaking Signal: Text Chat

With the recent rollout of Custom Matchmaking, we’re introducing a new signal called “TextChat” in early December. You can use this to influence the likelihood that users who are able to chat are matched together. This signal will consider if the user has Experience chat enabled, has completed an age check, and if they’re a similar age to other users in the server. This will be added as one of the signals in default matchmaking. You can adjust the signal’s weight with Custom Matchmaking in your experience’s dashboard on Creator Hub.

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We recommend that you run experiments that increase the weight of this signal to help ensure that players are still able to chat with others in the server that they’re in.

Check if users have Experience chat or Voice chat enabled

You can use the following APIs to check a user’s chat status:

  • TextChatService:CanUserChatAsync: See if a user has access to Experience chat.
  • TextChatService:CanUsersChatAsync: See if two users can chat with each other.
  • VoiceChatService:IsVoiceEnabledForUserIdAsync: Check if a user has Voice chat enabled.

If a user does not have chat enabled, you can use custom UI to instruct them to enable it in their Communication settings.

Team Create Collaboration Feature in Studio

Beginning in December, creators will receive notifications in Studio and the Creator Hub to complete an age check. This will become a requirement to use the Team Create collaboration feature with other creators early next year. All creators will still be able to create in Studio and use Team Create alone; this change only applies when using the Collaborate feature in Team Create.

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Link Sharing

Early next year, we are prohibiting sharing or posting social media links/handles in experiences via the PolicyServiceAPI as they could direct users off-platform to unsafe interactions. To better protect our community, we are consolidating where social media links can be shared to designated areas on user profiles, Experience Details Page, and Communities. These links will only be accessible to 13+ age checked users.

This change returns an empty list for AllowedExternalLinkReferences in PolicyService API, which was previously the only way to display these links. This ensures nothing breaks in experiences that currently implement it. Refer to the FAQ below for some examples of what’s still allowed inside a game.

Note: If you are displaying links inside a game in any other way, this is already prohibited by our Community Standards. Please remove them immediately to avoid moderation action.

Next Steps

This is the first step we’re taking, and we’re carefully considering other places on Roblox that may require age checks. We will roll out these changes after careful consideration and conversation with creators, users, and parents. In the meantime, we’ll answer as many questions as we can and welcome your feedback in the comments.

FAQs

Additional information on age checks

Click here to view

What if age estimation gets my age wrong?

  • You have two main methods to correct an incorrect age assignment; ID verification, or having a parent with a linked account correct the age of the child’s account.

Who is checking my age when I go through Facial Age Estimation? What happens to the image(s) that is taken when I complete Facial Age Estimation?

  • Images are processed by Roblox’s vendor, Persona. Roblox is using privacy-protective methods to conduct age checks, ensuring that the user’s image and videos are only used for the facial age estimation and are deleted immediately thereafter.

Why are you rolling out to Australia first with a few other countries? Is this due to pressure from eSafety and their U16 social media ban?

  • We’ve been actively engaging with eSafety on our shared goal of keeping young Australians safe on our platform. We have been working on facial age estimation technology throughout 2025, and Australia will be one of the first countries where we will launch this technology, in line with our discussions with eSafety. We’re proud to demonstrate our commitment to leadership in digital safety, especially as Australia continues to shape global conversations around child protection online.

How accurate is this Facial Age Estimation technology?

  • Persona’s technology is continuously updated to accurately and anonymously estimate age. It’s been extensively tested and certified by third-party validators and is substantially more accurate than self reporting or estimation based on user behavior.

    If the system estimates that a user is under 13, then we will automatically assign the user’s age to under 13 and remove access to features that are not appropriate for that age. If this estimation doesn’t reflect a user’s actual age, the user will have the option to verify with a government ID.

Additional Information on the Chat Changes

Click here to view

What happens when this is required?

  • Users who have not completed an age check will be unable to use any chat features (Experience, Party, Direct, or Voice).

  • In your experiences, this means some users will not be able to chat or see messages.

  • Their chat window will display only system messages and an ‘Unlock chat’ button, prompting them to verify. Once verified, they can resume chatting immediately.

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Can users chat with others outside of their age band if they are Trusted Connections?

  • We recognize that it’s important for family and friends to be able to communicate with each other, regardless of their age. Through Trusted Connections, age-checked users 13 or older can chat freely with people they know. We’ll soon roll out dedicated solutions for Direct chat between parents and children younger than 13 or between siblings in different age groups.

Does this new policy affect communication methods I build myself (ie. custom in-game messaging systems, signboards, or other input fields)?

  • All chat must go through TextChatService, and age checks are required to access chat.

How should I moderate or manage chat in my experience?

  • As a reminder, any text communication between users in your experience needs to run through TextChatService to remain in compliance with our Community Standards. We know that many developers and community managers rely on Experience chat for moderation. We are looking into solutions to address the impact of these changes and will share more early next year.

For a given user, will I be able to see if they have chat enabled?

  • Yes, the TextChatService:CanUserChatAsync API allows developers to see if users can’t chat which includes if a user is not age checked or has the Experience chat setting set to “no one.”

How many fewer users can I expect to have access to chat in my experience?

  • As users are age checking you can expect to see a drop in chat usage which may impact gameplay if chat is a core part of your experience. We are encouraging as many users as possible to go through age check flows and get access back.

Can creators make their own preset messages?

  • No, however we’re currently considering how we can safely enable creators to implement this type of functionality.

If a user is not a similar age to another user, what will they see when they try to chat with them?

  • Neither user will see each other’s chat; no message will appear for the other user.

How will Roblox prevent the problem from simply shifting to non-chat forms of inappropriate communication (emotes, editable objects, external messaging platforms)?

  • Age checks are just one part of the safety systems that we have on Roblox. Online safety is a complex and difficult issue without a single solution. For every safety improvement or change, bad actors are constantly attempting to work around those changes. Knowing this, we’ll continue to iterate and introduce new systems to identify and take action on those who violate our policies.

Will I still be able to send messages to every player through system messages?

  • Yes, you will still be able to send system messages to users even if they have not completed an age check; they will still see those messages in their chat window.

Will users be kicked from an experience if they click ‘Unlock chat’ to complete an age check?

  • No, users will be able to complete an age check while still in-experience and won’t be removed from the game.

Additional Information on Studio Collaboration and Social Media Link Changes

Click here to view

Why is this change being applied to Team Create?

  • We are applying age checks to anywhere that users of significantly different ages are chatting or interacting; this includes Roblox Studio.

Can I still be in a group on Creator Hub with someone outside of my age group or similar age groups?

  • Yes. Only collaboration through Team Create in Studio is age-gated.

How will revenue sharing work between creators in different age groups?

  • Revenue sharing will not be impacted by these changes.

Does this mean I can no longer edit experiences if they’re shared by someone outside of my age group? What happens to the experiences that have been shared with me already?

  • Creators under 16 will need parental permission or be Trusted Connections with all collaborators older than their age group inside an Experience in Studio.

For the experiences that have already been shared, they will not be removed from the collaborator list, but they will be blocked from editing the experience until they complete the requirements.

How will I know if my teammate needs their parent’s permission to collaborate with me in Studio?

  • In the ‘Manage Collaborators’ menu, you’ll see an indicator next to the teammates who need to take further action to be able to collaborate.

    Creators who are blocked from collaborating will see prompts inside Studio to take action to check their age, become Trusted Connections, or get parental permission.

Sharing my socials inside a game helps me build my community and get bug reports in a timely manner. How do I do that now?

  • Here are examples of how you can still reference your social media accounts and communities in-game

    :white_check_mark: “Check out our social media links on our game’s page”
    :white_check_mark: “Send your bug reports to our Discord server. Links on our game’s page”
    :white_check_mark: “Follow us on social media for merch. Links on our game’s page”
    :white_check_mark: “Join us in our Community Server. Links on our game’s page”

    Whereas, here what’s not allowed to be displayed in-game, per our Community Standards

    :cross_mark: “Follow for merch on X.com/abc”
    This was allowed for via AllowedExternalLinkReferences of PolicyServiceAPI and will no longer be allowed from early 2026

    :cross_mark: “Join our Discord discord.gg/invitecode”
    This was allowed only via the AllowedExternalLinkReferences of PolicyServiceAPI and will no longer be allowed from early 2026

    :cross_mark: “Send bug reports to abc@xyz.com”
    This has never been allowed.

42 Likes
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This topic was automatically opened after 10 minutes.

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It is?!?!?

That would be fine if chat wasn’t such a big part of the platform.

That’s ridiculous. What? Why Team Create?

Why don’t you just leave it only to the countries that want restrictions?

This is good, at least it gets deleted.

That’s expected, but still great it was added.

we are NOT doing this

My brother has long hair and has been mistaken for being female on occasion. He brought up a good point, would this for some reason change the account’s gender if it detects the wrong thing?

Bring back safe chat, end of sentence.

These team create restrictions are ridiculous. I already don’t like Team Create, but this just gives me more reasons.

Pointless restriction

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Awesome! We love mandatory identity checks and age verification on every major social platform. Nobody needs privacy online. Thank you Roblox.

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(This reply inncludes information from the Newsroom post, which covers the age ranges for “Can users chat with others outside of their age band if they are Trusted Connections?” in the FAQ.)

Thank you Roblox, you will be fostering a safer community on Roblox… by killing the communities and forcing them off Roblox to less safe options. You have potentially started the doomsday clock for security groups, or any group where you roleplay as a lower rank under the community managers acting as high ranks.

Here are some base stats:

  • About 40% of Innovation Security Training Facility’s players are 13-17, and about 20% are younger. This experience is a requirement to rank up in the group, and runs manually with community managers in single servers (no splitting of ages between servers).

  • About 70% of Innovation Security’s community managers are 21+. About 25% are 18+ but not 21+.

With these 2, assuming a 100% take rate for willingly giving a video of your face to a random company: 70% of the community managers will be unable to interact with at least 60% of the community, since they can only interact with 18+ people. They also can’t interact with the last 5% of the community managers who aren’t 18+. At least 20% of the players are uninteractable by all community managers because <12 is inaccessible by all.

By interact, this is mostly with sessions in the Training Facility, but also moderation. For me, I can’t see what 70% of players are saying, or tell them to stop what they are doing. Or collect evidence for action against others. Or handle appeals. I can only ban players with limited information and force them off-platform to Discord to continue. As a reminder, Discord is outside of Roblox’s control, has no gloabl text filter, has no image approval system, and allows porn. I know a Roblox Discord server in social media links that has porn in the main channel’s pins, and Roblox moderation would not take down the link.

While we could spend a lot of money to roll out a minigame type system for ranking up, we would cease to be any different from other minigame experiences and would exit the lower rank roleplay niche. That niche can just disappear entirely.

Moving on to Ultimate Mining Tycoon, we have a new problem. Not as players, but as creators. Our demographics push a lot more 18+ than normal, so we only lose 50% of our players being able to give realtime us any feedback on-platform. They think we are just ignoring them, when we aren’t the ones deciding to do so. We will need to instead force them off-platform, again, to Discord. Which again, has worse safety issues.

Oh, and what about friends that alternate between 2 and 3 years apart because of birthdays? I can be 2 years from someone, and then jump to 3 years in May, unexpectedly lose contact with me on-platform, and then regain contact when their birthday happens later in the year. If we aren’t on Discord and relying on Roblox’s chat, we will be completely cut off for months on end.

That is unless we find a game that violates the rules by implementing a custom chat system that doesn’t respect the age groupings. Those exist now, and will grow more. Maybe someone looking to redirect people off-platform with this setup will use this to profile users with large enough servers to figure out age ranges with any sort of API that determines if 2 players can chat. That just sounds like a “coloring problem” in graph theory that ChatGPT can figure out.

In summary:

  • Roblox is feeding into the narrative that handing over personal information of minors to random companies and individuals is a good idea (it isn’t - this will increase identity theft, fraud, and child endangerment).

  • Security and related roleplay groups will need to force people off-platform onto platforms that allow porn, or die out refusing to do so.

  • Malicious games will continue to exist, since this can’t be automatically detected. Pretty sure this is what happened with Roblox getting banned in Turkey a while ago.

  • Funneling people off-platform will drastically increase to the point of being normalized. Again, outside of Roblox’s control, and arguably less safe.

  • Moderation and realtime feedback of games will drastically suffer, annd the FAQ only mentions they are “looking into solutions”.

This change should not be rolled out globally, and must not unless we are ready for another massive chunk of Roblox to vanish or become unsafe. This is not a PR win - this just increases child endangerment off-platform and kills communities in the process, and give predators more Discord servers to exploit.

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No just no. This won’t work, this is too enforcing on the users and greatly invades our privacy, loads of users don’t want to share personal information to roblox or third party services as we can’t trust what happens with our data. It would be best to find another solution to this problem. Removing feature from the users by them not verify will decrease the engagement on the platform. Age checks is a horrible feature in my opinion.

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Yeah. No. We are not doing this.
Poll.

  • ABSOLUTELY NOT.
  • No.
  • Yes blah blah blah
0 voters

@RbxRocketMan , LOOK AT THE POLL, AND THE REPLIES TO THIS POST.
WHAT DO YOU SEE?

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Once again, let us ratio Roblox to show them how much we disagree with this update.

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The community asked for better moderation not age checks.

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ok obviously this is a godawful idea and goes in the same boat as the audio update of “who would have EVER signed off on this” for a plethora of reasons, i could probably write a solid few paragraphs on why this is a horrible idea for everybody involved and obviously that’s the case because of the zero likes in nearly ten minutes lmao.

but also you all were collectively kinda asking for it when the entire playerbase went up in arms because schlep was banned. he shouldn’t have been banned but you should all know by now that roblox hardly correctly takes feedback from their own players so they saw that whole thing about people complaining as “we need safety” because it broke out into something the general public saw. this is their idea of “safety” and it’s only going to get worse from here unfortunately. it’s sad that this is the state of the platform but here we are..

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Besides literally everyone being completely against this feature, please at least have a system to put different age groups in different servers (<16 and 16+).

This should be togglable by the owner of a game as competitive games likely won’t care about chat, but every other game will suffer immensely from dead chat.

Okay, this appears to be partially supported by this:

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Hopefully this will get rolled back when they realize it’s a bad thing for the platform after a couple months of testing.

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Roblox. How about:

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and instead improve on moderation.

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You are welcome to use Team Create. Alone. All of the downsides of cloud storage, none of the upsides of collaboration.

What’s the long view on this one? Upload your ID, let an AI scan your face, or die?

Anyway, if people need to collaborate without using Studio together… Consider Rojo.

It lets you store your game off of Roblox so you can be treated like an adult by sites like GitHub.

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Does someone that has confirmed their legal identity through the DevEx program also need to verify their ages? And if so why?

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are you guys sure that all of the faces and ids wont get leaked? This is a big problem amongs many sites that enforced id verification to use something

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The end of Roblox is here, nobody will be giving up their information.

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This is one of the few times i absolutely disagree with robloxs decision in any way

What do you think about this update in a scale 1-10
  • 1
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0 voters

(10 being the worst)

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How will this benefit the platform theres people out there who look younger or older then there age?

Some people get puberty early and develop facial hair and acne that makes them look older.

Also, most games rely on player coordination ehich wont happen cause they can’t chat due to age restrictions.

35 Likes