The following issue resides with a multitude of older UGC items, which at one point creators had the ability to archive. This would allow creators to render items useless at any point after it had been uploaded, which is unfair to the consumer.
Below is an example of an item is archived:
Users who had bought these accessories never recieved compensation for these items after they abruptly became invisible, which is unfair.
These items had practically become deleted by the creator, yet they still had the ability to keep them up so they could collect any robux it had generated. Luckily, this archive bug was fixed, but nobody was ever refunded for it.
Expected behavior
If this issue was fixed, I would expect Roblox to issue refunds and delete violating items that have archived dependencies. This would allow players to gain their lost robux back that was lost by buying these items.
these archived items did not give buyers refunds as they were not Content Deleted–only the mesh and/or texture were archived. This bug was prevalent a few months ago with Heads/Bundles as well, but those were all purged quickly. (as they allowed for headless/invisible avatars) Hoping for these to also be purged!!
Very surprised Roblox hasn’t taken action to deal with archived accessories. There were a few legit creators here and there who might’ve accidentally archived the wrong asset or used it to clear out broken accessories which never went on sale, but most of the time archiving was used by UGC creators to hide knockoff accessories from moderation.
Plenty of players bought these items unaware that they’d be at risk of removal, either by moderation or by archival, but the end result is the same either way. UGC creators were able to abuse this for months, and there still hasn’t been any proper closure that I’m aware of.
That would explain why refunds being handed out is usually a mixed bag on if it happens or not, because an automated system doesn’t work 100% of the time.
Besides, despite what you mentioned (the assets in the item were archived but the item itself wasn’t content deleted):
the item will eventually get deleted, handing out these (apparent) automated refunds in the end
I think there’s still some blame on the users for buying from blatantly shady creators (extremely empty group run by a throwaway alt, the apparent CEO being a very empty account, and the group itself having a previous name impersonating Nike - not to mention that same CEO advertising a group that they had openly sold off + another group they run hosting stolen clothing)
I don’t think it’s fair to pin the blame on users, especially at this point in time the UGC program was expected to be monitored with select users. This should of been up to Roblox to have fixed this issue a while ago.
Thanks for reporting this issue. Mitigation is in progress. We will review the related assets and take appropriate action based on our policy. The status will be updated once the fix is complete.
If you’re planning to restore all catalog items with archived dependencies, this is a terrible decision. In 99% of cases where I’ve seen a catalog item’s dependency archived without the item itself being deleted, the creator’s intent was malicious.
A good example is knockoff copied face items. Just a few days ago, I came across a group that had 5–10 identical copies of Roblox faces, each with 2–3K favorites, with their textures archived to evade moderation—allowing them to profit from these items while avoiding consequences. If this change takes place, they’ll all be restored, effectively flooding the catalog with rule-breaking assets and letting them bypass the recent moderation waves that were supposed to address this issue.
And it’s not just knockoffs—malicious, game-breaking accessories also use this method to avoid detection in moderation waves, and it’s possible now they will be restored without issue. If this is what the decision is, I don’t understand the reasoning behind it, and it seems like this entire scenario hasn’t been properly considered, if at all—especially the real intent behind creators archiving dependencies of their catalog items.
