As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to manage and find games on the translator portal page. Since anyone can add entire groups or people as translators to their game without asking, my translator portal has been spammed with random games used as ads for groups or to show inappropriate usernames and/or titles. I can’t find any option to leave these games. I’m not even in the groups that added me.
Some of these games are uploaded by alt accounts and alt-account-owned groups.
This is a very big issue as it allows anyone to hinder your workflow, show inappropriate messages and breach your privacy.
This is what my translator portal looks like (I censored what I thought could count as doxing other [real ]users as well as swear words):
And that’s only page 1!
I didn’t give consent to being added as a translator for any of these games!
Potential Solutions:
Send a message to the user inviting them to be a translator;
Add a “Who can invite me to be a translator” dropdown to the user settings privacy section;
Only allow friends and groups that the user is in, to add said user as a translator;
Allow users to quit their roles as translators in any game;
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I would be able to find the games I want to translate faster whilst avoiding inappropriate content and ads.
In 2022, I created a topic sharing the Translator Portal feature and how negative it was regarding the impacts of having experiences that you are not affiliated with, yet able to access freely:
It seems that at the same moment, the experiences being provided in the photos are also being shared with me at my portal created by inappropriate accounts and unknown groups that I do recognise, resulting in potential bad behaviour while abusing the translation system…
I support the idea overall to ask the translator and have options to allow only friends and groups the player entered. It would be easier to detect, manage properly and improve tons of experiences for developers at Creator Hub → Creator Dashboard.
I originally made that bug report you linked because I genuinely thought that there was some sort of bug, similar to how some newly made audios randomly give random games permission to use it or how at one point in the past group store pages would show random clothing from other groups.
Turns out that it’s not a bug, and instead is completely intentional and allowed behavior.
Since the only way to get anything fixed on Roblox is to abuse it until enough people are yelling about it, I decided to start advertising my clothing group (the Group A in that image) - Seems like even after all this time Roblox still doesn’t care, much less want to bother adding in proper permission checks. (This issue has been around for much longer than the bug report I made)
Giving people team create access to games requires you to be friends with them, or have permission in a group to do so, why can’t translator access have similar restrictions? It shouldn’t be that hard to implement, and it would avoid the place getting as cluttered as it is.
Not to mention, for the games that do give you access to translate languages in the games, there’s literally nothing stopping you from changing them to whatever you like across all the languages the developer provided (for example, even more advertisements for my clothing group)
In short, the translator portal was a mess of an update that clearly had no thought put into it past the absolute base level of functionality, and has been abandoned since then.
Abusing a limitation of a system is not automatically an “allowed” behavior. If they are not already thinking about retroactively punishing folks who do this, they really should think about doing that after they have released an improvement here.
Contributing to the problem is not helpful and not clever. Advocating for a solution for the problem (like first poster) is.
This is not constructive feedback. The forum is not a place to show off grandstanding capabilities. Focus on the issues and discussing those constructively.
Big props to the OP for instead being completely constructive in their wording.
I randomly clicked on the button for the Translator Portal, assuming that I either needed prior requirements or would see a message telling me I haven’t been added to any games, and came across this:
This was quite unexpected for me, because I do not consider myself a widely known developer, so it seems like some people are running bots to add as many users as possible to games as translators.
One icon immediately caught my attention:
The person who made the game is encouraging people to spam this issue on the DevForum:
It also looks like people are somehow bypassing the filter in the Translator Portal:
While this was personally pretty funny for me, I can see how if I was an actual translator, this would be extremely annoying.
Edit: After flipping through the pages, it looks like for some reason games are repeated as well? Definitely needs a bit more work in it’s current state.
Edit 2: After following a link in a game description, I came across a group owned by an active DevForum member I myself have encountered multiple times and has a respectable 1000 days visited on their DevForum profile, the plot thickens!
Edit #3 (25/04/2023): It’s been a while since I posted this, but I just want to say that the reason I saw this other active DevForum member in my Translator Portal is because anyone can add all the games owned by any group to anyone’s translator portal! There is no permission requirement! I believe this is a huge flaw in the system, all it does it lead to spam. Since when do random people need to be able to add translators to a game?
