As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to claim groups that have no members and are on manual approval because there is no one than can approve you into the group.
If Roblox is able to address your issue, how would it improve your game and/or your development experience? - I currently don’t see a reason as to why it’s impossible to claim a group with no members that has manual approval turned on. These groups are currently being wasted since no one can take their names, nor can they claim the group. Of course, some people might not need their groups anymore, but they have games they don’t want anyone to take in these groups so this is the only way to protect them, but this issue could easily be fixed by letting the group owner choose who can claim the group once it has no members, or having an option that would only allow the original group creator to claim the group after everyone has left. If Roblox were to implement this feature, the old groups with games would open up for anyone to take which would be a problem to some of the group owners, but this could be prevented by making only the groups which have no games open up.
This defeats the purpose of the feature request, as some of the groups you see locked now are purposefully locked to achieve the same effect. Groups would still be locked, albeit with an official feature, and no one would be able to use the name.
Games are not the only problem. Before this intentional change, users would comb through abandoned groups and steal the remaining group funds to get free Robux. Aside from games/funds, the new owner would also be able to see all of the potentially private audit log, shout, and wall. They would also have access to start re-selling all of the group’s clothing/models.
Groups have too much extra baggage. You will never be able to claim groups because of this.
The problem is not that you can’t claim closed groups. The problem is that you can’t get the name you’d like for your new group. Now that we have a clearer picture of the problem, some more reasonable solutions present themselves:
Free group names when they are abandoned (whether by archiving the group or changing the name), so while the group’s content remains private, the name can be used again
Look into whether or not group names need to be unique
A lot of people have already requested this, you can use the devforum search for find several other similar topics. They’re probably never going to consider this.
This defeats the purpose of the feature request, as some of the groups you see locked now are purposefully locked to achieve the same effect. Groups would still be locked, albeit with an official feature, and no one would be able to use the name.
No it doesn’t as no one, not even the group owner can claim the group which they abandoned.
Before this intentional change, users would comb through abandoned groups and steal the remaining group funds to get free Robux. Aside from games/funds, the new owner would also be able to see all of the potentially private audit log, shout, and wall. They would also have access to start re-selling all of the group’s clothing/models.
People can still do this with groups that are not locked. The problem with the manual approval lock is that not even the owner of the group can claim it back, in the original post I proposed a system which could be implemented instead where the owner could choose who could claim the group if anyone at all.
@dragonfrosting I tried to look it up, but found nothing similar.
The problem with this is that there is absolutely no way for me to delete places permanently. So if I ever abandon a development group, anyone would be able to claim the group and steal the places I had created with it. Not to mention all of the groups I have already abandoned expecting them to be locked forever.
Of course though if this happened people would try to imitate popular developer groups, or just any popular group at that. With names being opened up, I think we’d need a system where these more popular groups can get verified, and have it show on their group page that they’re verified…