As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to designate a specific place of an all-ages experience as 17+ or age restricted.
It’s no secret that a number of social experiences foster an increasingly more mature community, however the current solution of publishing an entirely separate experience is hacky at best and hurts performance. The truth is that many 17+ experiences don’t feature any inherently mature content - they simply wish to have a designated space for older players to interact.
We recently made the decision to discontinue the 17+ version of PLS DONATE because it simply was not worth maintaining. Being under a separate experience, it diverted CCU from the primary experience - and with no access to one another’s datastores, many stats did not transfer between the two experiences.
Bearing user safety in mind, here’s how I would like to see such a system implemented:
- Allow developers to override the age restriction of a given place without misrepresenting their experience on the questionnaire. Currently, the only way for a developer to age-gate their experience is to claim their innocuous experience features exceptionally explicit or violent content, which makes age recommendations as a whole less effective.
- Require age restricted places to follow the same guidelines as the encompassing experience. By extension, <17 developers should not be barred from creating or editing 17+ sub-places of an all-ages experience.
- Implement an API to check if a user can access an age-restricted place or experience - perhaps in a similar manner to VoiceChatService:IsVoiceEnabledForUserIdAsync.
If this feature request was implemented, it would allow more social experiences to thrive among an older community without hurting the user experience.