If a near-complete solution to group harassers would take 5-10 years, I would definitely be in favor of group banning. But that’s not how long I’m asking you to wait. I’m asking for a week to a month of planning (not years) dedicated to finding a better (not necessarily complete) solution, and unless ROBLOX starts on group banning immediately right now (which is doubtful since they have other things on their plate), that gives us plenty of time to come up with a better solution by the time they’re ready to work on it.
If we can’t find a better solution, group banning is the way to go, but if we can find a better solution, we would feel significantly better not having to deal with group harassers as much. I don’t think that’s much to ask. Also keep in mind that group banning isn’t going to be implemented instantly once/if ROBLOX decides to work on it. If we can come up with a better solution before ROBLOX starts on it, it would probably take around the same time to implement.
In my experience, the Buffer Rank solution and the Group Ban solution are both valid. One or the other would be nice. I’m advocating for the Group Ban because I feel like it would be a simpler solution while solving about as much of the problem as a Buffer Rank.
If you come up with a better solution, by all means, let us in on it. Until then, banning is proven to be a pretty effective deterrent, even when users can make accounts relatively quickly.
The buffer rank stops mostly every harasser, including the most severe, dead in their tracks. Very little people will play a game six hours straight over and over and over just to get a couple minutes of harassment time. In the extreme case that someone does though and they only get 6 hours of sleep and spend the rest of their 18 waking hours aimed at harassing your group, they’ll only be able to have an outburst three times. If they spend their entire day playing your game, they’ll still only be able to make three small outbursts before they get demoted/exiled. If they’re not very quickly discouraged (which is very likely), you’ll at most have to deal with only three outbursts per day, and that’s only from the most persistent of people.
With group banning, you may be stopping small harassment, but the depression-inducing harassers who are hell-bent on making your life miserable (e.g. sailor hat dude) roam free – group banning doesn’t affect these people. They will continue to, minute-by-minute, steal your time and sour your day.
Group banning does not take care of the most severe harassers, so it doesn’t solve about as much as the problem as the buffer rank. It still has a gaping hole that the buffer rank does not. The only benefit group banning has over the buffer rank is that it doesn’t require scripting, but that’s such a minor issue because any group can get their hands on a free model which implements a buffer rank for them. The buffer rank is, by far, a better solution than group banning.
But again, neither of these are absolute. We’re not likely to get anything as the web team has very very low presence on the dev forums. They’re busy doing other things.
That’s even more reason to provide them with the best possible solution the first time around instead of settling for the first pipe dream that comes to mind. If what we suggest doesn’t solve the problem near-entirely, we’ll have to wait even longer to have a better solution implemented. We also have plenty of time to devise better solutions if that’s the case as well.
You keep saying that the Group Ban has no effect on the extreme cases when even that has been proven false. I can show you how just banning them from my game has had an impact.
The solution isn’t perfect, we get that. We want it anyway because banning is a proven deterrent, and we currently have no ban option on groups.
Also, 6 hours to even be able to join the community is both bad for the players and bad for business.
At this point, I think it’s more of a pride thing for you to squash the Group Ban option until the year 2033 when we had AI to do it for us.
Of course a group ban feature would be nice to have and it would stop the non-dedicated spammers, but when considering the web team’s available development time, I’d much rather have them spend time developing a more comprehensive solution that knocks out a lot more problems. Like Echo said, if they choose to develop a group ban feature, it’ll almost certainly be a very long time before we can get anything better in the future.
It wouldn’t just be something simple to hold us over while they develop a better solution - it’s the only thing we would get for a long time, and we’d still be stuck without a built-in way to handle the truly dedicated spammers.
Group banning:
Easy for novice group owners to use
Stops the more casual spammers from pestering your group for long
Ineffective at handling persistent spammers who create multiple accounts (honestly, it takes no time at all to create a throwaway account with a gibberish username & PW)
In-game group ranking system + buffer rank:
Requires a bit more know-how to use (but can easily be implemented with a free model)
Hugely effective against all types of spammers
You can implement your own in-game ban list to achieve the same effect as the originally suggested feature
Can be used for more than just banning users & restricting posts; this finally allows all groups to have an automatic ranking system without the use of a web-based bot
The latter suggestion solves 100% of the problem and provides added benefits beyond just restricting/banning users from posting in your group. That’s the one I’d rather have the web team develop with their limited time/resources.
Both ideas are viable. While no system is perfect, I would be okay with the buffer rank option.
We just need some darn API for changing ranks in-game.
The reason I was so adamant about the Group Ban is because it appears much easier for the Web team to implement. If they have the time to choose one or the other, I’d prefer the buffer rank. But I know they’re always busy
I’m not part of any ROBLOX dev team, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but banning isn’t something they can implement overnight. Changes involving group banning would involve reading/writing to internal databases (need to keep track of who is banned), rank permissions (who can ban people), interface for unbanning people (probably another tab in Group Admin), etc. On the other hand, rank-changing in-game would only need some web call tweaks, and requests similar to rank-changing in-game (e.g. GetGroupInfoAsync, GetGroupsAsync, etc) were all implemented by interns (that is to say, people that hadn’t worked with ROBLOX’s internal code until just recently were able to make the changes). Rank-changing in-game, at least from the outside, seems like it’d be the easier of the two to implement.