As you develop, we want you to have peace of mind that other users cannot discover and leak what you are creating before it is ready. We achieved our first milestone towards this goal recently by removing the ability to find unavailable items – assets that users did not intend to be public – from the Library. Users who want to view their own private assets can still do so from the Create page.
In the future we hope to expand these privacy protections to cover other parts of the product, e.g. the user inventory page. Let us know what you think, and whether further asset privacy improvements are important to you!
Special thanks to @someT42 for implementing this change.
A much much needed change to stop people from looking at all the audio files, decals and other assets before intended. I hate it when people look at my decals in the catalogue and can find my assets.
Does this currently also affect the Roblox catalogue for items? If it does this should be reverted instantly, as then we cannot find assets made by Roblox that are no longer for sale (e.g. Roblox Character Encyclopedia) meaning we can’t find gear/accessories that are off-sale for looking/reference and inserting into games.
Removing the ability to find items in the library is a good first step, but this is not a great solution for total privacy. It’s still possible to discover items that are off sale through other methods like iterating over all asset IDs.
In the future, it would be ideal if private assets would simply give an unauthorized user a 404 not found error and display no information at all about the asset.
I think this update will definitely help a lot once it covers the inventory page, as I know what it’s like to have people check your inventory often to steal whatever they can for their games.
That hides all of your items though, which prevents you from trading, for example. Having the ability to hide only your development assets would be way more efficient, in my opinion.
I embarrassingly and admittedly loved the ability to snoop through players’ inventories for assets for usable assets temporarily (mostly only audio, nothing else). That’s not to say that I’m against this update though - it certainly does bring joy to my eyes.
Asset privacy is good for many reasons:
Keeping thieves like me from snooping inventories
Being able to keep your future plans a secret
Being able to comply with third-party licensing (especially when purchasing assets)
hiding your messy inventory full of hundreds of pages of scrapped work
Appreciate the update. I’m looking forward to know what else Roblox has in store for us on the asset forefront.
This is a step in the right direction. Discoverability is not as important as something like solving the private module issue well. I think overall the feedback here should help guide the team in the right direction.
