You should not be making your own filter in the first place. Roblox has API’s for this so you don’t need to.
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I disagree. The roblox filter is known for being bypassed constantly by the most stupid word combinations. Remember a few months ago when you could say the n-word within the chat by saying “jew” before it?
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inb4 this is going to be like youtube’s moderation system where you can upload gore but you can’t swear
Considering that the current moderation system can’t catch Synapse Xen obfuscation for months at a time, that’s probably what’s going to happen. We can debate privacy all we want, but it’s clear that this moderation system won’t work at all.
Will I be flagged for writing something like this?
local t = {}
t.__index = t
t.__metatable = "sal didn't use getrawmetatable making him tonight's biggest loser"
Probably. Will I be flagged for Synapse Xen obfuscation, though? Not until someone reports it, as clearly shown by the hundreds of backdoors currently in the Roblox library. Even after hundreds of revisions, you can’t make a perfect system, and “quickly” is never quick enough when your game is well-known.
I would consider moving to Unity or Unreal if it weren’t for the fact that Roblox is much easier to advertise on.
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I intensely disagree with this code-review system, but the original post did say this:
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There is a problem though, it is now 100% required to use the filtering api on all types of communication and player-generated strings. Would moderators take action against the creator for code that, at the time of it’s creation, followed all rules? (Which is something that already happens with images and sounds.)
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This was always a requirement far before this system was implemented and I can find and send you posts proving this if you don’t believe me.
Yup, you get banned for things that were previously allowed. I have a massive post ranting about this.
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You mean having some kind of filtering system, not using roblox’s api, right? Since (at least as far as I’m aware) it wasn’t implemented until sometime in 2016, correct me if I’m wrong.
2016 is far before this system was implemented. This code-review has only existed for a few months. The word “always” in my statement may be the confusing part, but my focus was more on the “before this system was implemented.”
Edit: I mistakenly read your “it is now 100% required” as referring to this review forcing you to do this.
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Not the “safety review” for scripts, the filtering API. Sorry if I was unclear.
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I’m really unhappy that this even exists to begin with. My code is my code, whether or not I include anything technically against TOS. Just because my code might be considered “against TOS” does not mean anything to a player of my games. I am the developer of my game, whether or not my code contains innapropriate language, “personally” identifiable information, or anything else, nobody is supposed to see my code. This code is only for me to see.
This is equivalent to saying players who type inappropriate content into text boxes are apt to be banned. Nobody is seeing what they type, that’s personal to them in the same way nobody is seeing my code. Are they intentionally doing it? Probably. Does that make it unsafe for them to type inappropriate content in a text box? Well depending on context this could mean literally anything. With something both as abstract and literal as code is, it’s utterly impossible to judge a developer’s intentions on their code. Having moderators review something they may have no knowledge of is completely ridiculous.
Finally, Roblox cannot track free model usage effectively. Users will start targeting games by including potentially inappropriate content in their models. These models can be reviewed, but the entire basis of this form of botting is that moderators can never instantly review anything. Developers could make slight adjustments to code, and there’d be no way to know if they see something innapropriate.
This is not okay in my book. There are too many issues, and it’s laughably unclear what any of this could mean. How can anyone rely on Roblox as a platform with this type of potentially nonsensical moderation? How is Roblox even going to clarify the amount of issues here without locking their moderation in place? Surely Roblox is aware of the issues with this to begin with, but how Roblox plans to make this form of moderation reliable for anyone is completely unclear and I feel that this just cannot be clarified.
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Hey guys, on the bright side, now you have a way to get Roblox’s attention when they’re ignoring our feedback.
Write a violent manifesto and sprinkle in curses so it gets flagged, and have a message at the bottom. They’ll finally read it then!
/s
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Who thought this was a good idea? Roblox’s automated moderation system is bad enough as it is, why make scripts another potential cause for a random ban? More focus should be put towards improving the moderation system itself rather than adding more onto the list of horrendous flaws it has. It’s already nearly impossible to have a conversation with someone else on Roblox without any of my messages getting filtered when none of them contained anything explicit to begin with. If this “specially-trained team” is the same group of people – if they even are people – responsible for the multiple unjustified bans/warnings that my friends have received (one of them got their account locked for 3 days for putting a single swear word in comment in a game with tens of thousands of lines of code!) then this system is an absolutely horrible idea. As you can see from nearly 200 of the previous posts, it’s already received a lot of community backfire. Now what is the community response going to be like when this system gets fully implemented?
Oh, and this is also not to mention that this system feels like a gigantic breach of privacy. My code is for my own eyes only, and I would rather not have some intern at Roblox combing it for bad words.
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I didn’t even think about this. This is a gloriously ridiculous way to moderate games I feel. You’ll either end up with inconsistent, unclear moderation that effects everyone on a mass scale thus flooding moderation, or you get ridiculously slow moderation that isn’t effective and is easily abusable by bots. This doesn’t just pose huge problems in terms of clarity, it creates an incentive to include bad content for the people who even have bad intentions to begin with. Sure it makes sense on a basic level, but this is just such an unpredictable way to moderate for developers, or Roblox themselves that it’s wasting resources and it’s creating a gateway for even worse behaviour and impact on the platform.
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So if it passes moderation, Would the system just keep flagging it, or Flag it every time a edit is made?
Why has this taken months to get officially announced? In the future before these sorts of changes are even released or enforced we would like to be told beforehand so we can actually attempt to comply to them. Keeping developers in the dark for months about these sorts of changes is very damaging and with this change has put tons of accounts at risk of moderation for a rule that no one knew existed.
I dislike this change because lots of developers have sensitive information that they want to keep private like API keys. I am also very concerned about who this is even protecting because server scrips are only visible to the developer(s) that wrote them meaning they are effecting no one except themselves. Why are Roblox moderators even viewing game scripts in the first place?
Please, with this change don’t be so quick to pull the trigger on games and developers. Please communicate to developers and give developers time to fix issues within their code without instantly pulling the trigger on them. The Roblox moderation has had a track record of instantly banning developers and games for petty issues that could easily be fixed in a few minuses.
I am concerned about this point because some developers develop with their real life friends that already know each others personally-identifiable information. This means these developers could put their real names or other information of the sort because their is no harm in doing so.
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Imagine your game getting locked because you had “pee pee poo poo” as a jokingly placeholder text.
Not to mention that some words became offensive with time… What if my old script has word “lettuce” but then It becomes a hate symbol?
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Oh yeah, if anyone wants to know what the game that was mistakenly flagged was, it’s most likely Flood Escape by Crazyblox because it seems to fit all the criteria.
- mistakenly deleted about 10 months ago (reasonably long enough ago for Roblox to put this system into action)
- pretty messy coding, especially since the game wasn’t designed to work with FilteringEnabled, could’ve accidentally been seen as some sort of backdoor
- issue was resolved in around 1-2 days, considered “quick enough” by Roblox
If the game mentioned in the original post really is Flood Escape, then we have a big issue on our hands here. The algorithm and the human team were not only wrong, but they also managed to cut off a well-known developer’s source of income.
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Hopefully something like this isn’t considered as “personally-identifiable information” or else I’m screwed. I use plenty of modules where the authors sign off with their actual names.
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You should be fine so long as you’re not typing something like “-- Jackson Caius” I guess.
I’m just disappointed. Not sure what else to say.
I have begun working on my first real game on roblox just around 3 months ago and was just getting close to actually releasing an alpha version of it. While I don’t think there is anything in the code that would break any of the rules, the thought of someone else looking through my code and possibility of my account or game getting deleted because of let’s say some swear word I forgot I left in a comment or a variable name is seriously making me reconsider if I want to continue working here or if I should just take the idea and replicate it maybe on another platform. There are plenty of other engines I could use. A shame the one I got used to decides to treat devs this way. The devs that make roblox what it is.
I guess I’ll continue for now and see if roblox intends to do something about this issue. If not then it’s likely I will be leaving this platform soon.
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