You should be able to, as long as it’s nothing inappropriate.
i agree with removing it outright and i do not approve of this system in the slightest. i think that roblox would be the laughing stock of the industry.
but, i don’t think they will backtrack, cause that means they’d be admitting they were wrong to even introduce it in the first place
i’m all up for them doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling the moderation force but there’s gotta be some other idea
would you like to throw any solutions into the mix? maybe that could stir some brainstorming from the others too
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Considering the massive amounts of money Roblox makes, they should be more than able to hire more human moderators, AND keep improving the already existing AI-moderation (which needs severe improvements)
In other news:
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JUST NO. Every time you guys act like you’re testing things, get negative feedback, AND STILL DO IT!!
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i ABSOLUTELY agree to this
they’re making billions and billions of dollars.
I’m one of the roleplay game developers that will be affected by this change. i’ve personally spent several years developing a framework that is particularly catered to roleplay experiences, and ROBLOX is also my source of income
despite that, if roblox paid developers less just to hire more moderation, (if their billions don’t satisfy them) i would be fine with it
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One point I want to make, and something that I think you’ll see if you read many other users replies is that age groups of <13 and 13+ face somewhat different dangers with regard to child safety. Many hangout or group games aimed for older (13+) audiences have their own moderation - like many real AAA online games rated 13+ by ESRB would. Meanwhile, the typical talk about users <13 communicating is who they communicate with. I think people in this thread have different input depending on which audience they have more in mind.
This is barrier reflected in how laws like COPPA limit what data can be collected on users <13, and how many games don’t have freeform chat. Meanwhile, typically, 13+ games rely more on freedom, and many games on Roblox that align more closely to 10+ or 13+ games elsewhere are the ones that will encounter issues with the path this verification goes down. Similarly, at least what I have personally seen, a higher quantity of child safety concerns for users under 13 are about what they play/are exposed to, while safety concerns for users 13+ are about who they play with.
My personal opinion, just as one developer who hasn’t been very active since ~2018, is that you should approach users under 13 and over 13 completely differently (right now I think you’re approaching them too blanketedly), with:
<13: Focus limiting exposure to bad content, such as allowing parents to whitelist what games kids can play (this has already been suggested by some people; alternatively, a parental control only allowing games only made by a list of developers that has been manually approved by a dedicated team, this wouldn't take very many people to do), maybe bringing back menu chat (which I'm a big fan of because it allows to integrate communication while having pretty absolute control over what can be sent), making it so that developers can check if decals/models are uploaded by gov't id verified people (this would be a major help for any game that has spraypaint cans), etc. Literally anything with absolute control is a million times better than just relying on people not lying about ages or about their games age recommendations
13+: Focus on limiting communications with strangers, taking down known bad actors, and treating user reports adequately. I have a feeling that some of the incidents where reports were not run to the police were not just because they happened off-site, but because you guys didn't log everything and instead relied on 1.) developers using APIs appropriately and 2.) bypasses being negligible. If this was the case I hope that your report system over-documents rather than under-documents from now on. The best report systems in my opinion both over-provide on logging and context, and in an overview document go far enough as to include little things like how many reports on and against the perpetrator and the reporter have been made to further gauge how likely the report is to be accurate.
Currently, I think there are not enough of these “absolute” things that stop the game of cat and mouse being done for <13 users.
Further, for 13+ users, I think that the dividing of communications into subgroups is incompatible with games attempting to have good actors twofold: first, because it messes up games that have their own moderation systems, and second, because 13+ users are wise enough to warn each other that they might be getting taken advantage of if they are being taken to another platform. There is too little working directly with the community that is being done here.
Stuff like the team of professional investigators it sounds like are being considered sound really good and help all ages. UGC and player reports are two places where using AI is very high risk, and there are many reasons to think that your team is using AI in both cases. That’s a problem, especially for the type of content users <13 are able to see sometimes when they sign in. The current UGC state is pretty frustrating.
It is nice to see some numbers attached to Persona, but remember that you are splitting your age groups in 2 or 3-year windows when this is a 1.4 year average magnitude of error. That’s still actually impressive compared to what I thought I knew about the biology of aging, especially considering just basic photographs are used. But it seems like an issue.
I am not a professional in any field relating to this so everything I recommend should be taken with a grain of salt. I am curious what opinions other users and any one making decisions on Roblox’s team have about the things I called out as issues in this post.
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t moderation be one of the few areas where you CAN throw more bodies at the problem? Obviously, it wouldn’t fix the issues, but I feel like it would certainly help.
Hell, if bodies can be thrown at the issue, yall can (MAYBE) open up a ton of jobs and be like “Look at us, we’ve created tons of job opportunities! Aren’t we so great? Support our mission to provide jobs by buying Robux!!!” (I have 0 experience advertising and marketing, if that bit was really stupid, please tell me.)
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Making this platform safer is not possible and is not required.
I don’t understand, why Roblox is doing parents’ work? Roblox isn’t anymore a platform for kids. A big part in this platform took teens, and most likely Roblox have the main income from them (i guess). Teens do not need any restrictions as roblox think. Like i said in my first post, limiting the ability to communicate with older age groups may result in mental disorders IRL, or just problems with communication and emotion expression. >11 kids are smart enough to make fun of bad actors. If a kid for some reason becomes a predator’s victim, that’s not Roblox problem at all. I don’t understand why people are trying to sue Roblox when that’s parents fault? ONLY PARENTS FAULT
Improving the moderation is the key if you guys really want to make this platform safer (But i think that’s already way too safe). Even Discord has more moderators than you.
Personally, i would abandon the AI moderation because of false bans. I was banned 2 times by the AI for stupid reasons. The AI in next 10 years won’t be able to moderate effectively (I think)
There was a case, when i was playing Police RP game and told my colleague that the suspect is black. No discriminatory of something. And i’m getting banned on 3 days (Luckily getting unbanned after human revision).
I do understand that this is being done under the government pressure, but i dont understand why this is being done globally.
Roblox, why don’t you answer this question? Why do you enroll this globally, not only specific countries?
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technically yeah
there’s already an issue with people finding jobs
imagine ROBLOX actually contributing to the current labor market by having hundreds of thousands of jobs available, and all of that effort would be to simply help their players
it’d feel like we’d matter for once, and they could take a few laps in the PR department if they wanted the ego boost. perhaps it’s copium talking, but this would be a necessary step if roblox wants to be the shining standard of putting in as much effort in safety on the platform
“we have more moderators and player representatives than any other platform! we will be there to help!”
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so i just tried the verification on an alt i made, i’m 16, it estimated me as 14… isn’t that a huge issue
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Excuse me, but the people this is designed to protect against - are the most likely people to bypass simply with fake/stolen/open-source faces or IDs.
Like - why wouldn’t they?
Thus it provides 0 protection.
We want more moderators. Just listen to us and see what happens. Switch the chat filter AI from a simple AI to an LLM so it works significantly better.
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im actually going to remove chat from my games is this update actually comes out
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How about this gets reconsidered and you stop screwing over with my dev career.
I’m not verifying JUST TO CREATE GAMES. Period. Nothing will convince me otherwise.
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I made a really long post but what do other people on this thread think about the current option versus just having progressively more communication and gameplay limitations for progressively younger users? (Followed by maybe having some of those options come back with a parent account’s permission)
I totally understand Roblox not wanting to hire moderators to do the job, there are millions of players and that is totally not optimal to try and hire enough people to moderate thousands of reports every few minutes, or whatever the number actually is. That is insane, and would cost a boat load of money to pay for 24/7 moderation. I mean that would literally cut in developer funds hardcore.
They need to figure out a way to please everyone, the parents, and the players. And I do honestly believe anyone under the age of 13 should be under a safe chat bubble, anyone over 13 should know and realize by now what is proper safety measures for being on the internet. And if parents of a 13 or over child/teenager is still weary about their child/teenager having the ability to chat online, it should simply be restricted through their own personal means, not restricting everyone else just because parents fail to supervise their children.
And I do mean that with all my heart, the fact that this is even an issue is a output of failed parenting. Parents should take MORE responsibility for what their kids are doing, and what they’re able to see. There are already chat restriction features that parents can enable to help/solve issues with unsafe chats or unwanted chats from users deemed to be unsafe.
The fact that this is even an issue is 100% the parents faults for not reading into proper security measures for their children. I have been on the platform for almost 16 years now and I’ve yet to see it get this mad and stupid about something as simple as in-game chat. It was unheard of and there were far worse things that happened back then than now. I mean literally there would be NSFW content blasted all around, skyboxes would be NSFW, there would be so much stuff but there were no restrictions back then, there were no extreme measures like this.
Just because some disgruntled parents hopped on the lawsuit wagon were gonna ruin so many different experiences because some kids were left unsupervised for long periods of time and managed to get caught up with some weirdo predators.
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yes, roblox actually has way strickter moderation compared to other game publishing platforms, even has id verification and age groups yet people still throw dirt over roblox because parents let their children verify with their id
that being said, updates before this wasnt very stricting and having more moderation isnt a bad thing, this update however is literally the worst thing i have ever heard, and roblox was FORCED by lawyers and families to go this way.
Absolutely ATROCIOUS update. Undo this ASAP, holy hell.
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Update Summary:
[
] Protect Kids
[] Innocent players can play as before
[] Persona is accurate and reliable
[] Investors loves it and stock rises
[
] Developers leaving
okay mate
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This might aswell be the end for me trying to make games on roblox mostly because of the Team Create implementations.
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Just give us the option to adjust the chat restriction in our own experiences, for crying out loud. It would be a win win situation if we could fine tune the strictness of it and the chat filter, roleplay experiences tend to have extensive moderation ready to act at a moment’s notice.
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