Clarification on code flagged for safety review

I’ve always assumed that my code might get read by Roblox Employees at any time. I’m not upset about this at all. They have a great responsibility to keep the platform safe for younger players and having the capability to monitor all the code running on the platform is essential. I completely trust Roblox not to ‘steal’ any code or do anything with it. Monitoring suspicious code is not malicious and I’m not against it.

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I’ve always known that they were monitoring it, but I didn’t know they were banning you for swear words or personal licensing in the code! Not cool, Roblox.

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Exploiters. Just exploiters, because apparently that exploiter is 9 and they should be protected from seeing vulgar language in a script that they shouldn’t be looking at in the first place.

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Is anyone talking about the double standard they mentioned in the OP? Here’s roblox:

  • Your code is your own, you own it
  • If you use swear words we’ll cut off your access to it and perma ban your account because, well, it wasn’t really ever yours in the first place

Nice one roblox. Real nice.

Other thing to point out is that if you, God forbid, DO get caught lackin and roblox snipes you, there is literally no way at all to contact them and get a quick response so they can appeal it…

Swearers deserve jail time!!!

Also vote on my poll if u haven’t

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Imagine allowing people behind a screen to moderate our code without permission, imagine having a front page game and you have some scripts with filters or say a bad word filter that kicks them if they bypass words and you get banned and your game is took down?

  1. Why am I supposed to trust this person and who are they?
  2. What if they go rogue and steal the scripts and possibly the game?
  3. How much power do they have within this update?
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Same, Roblox is literally the only reason I was interested in programming and game developing in the first place, it would be really sad for me to have to use something else like Unity or UE4 to make games since Roblox is so simple to use.

To be entirely fair, even AAA - level games use swear words in the code… Unity projects and such do not use a chat filter, haha. If roblox is trying to set an industry-first, censored IDE then you know what

maybe all the unity devs were right and roblox is the laughing stock of game development!

i have plenty of questions… and i still can’t believe how roblox managed to come to this conclusion

how was such a thing even discussed?
what sparked them to make such change?
who are the secret FBI team scanning through my code?

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Roblox, this has gone on too long. 4 days? 1000 replies? An angry mob of developers, who are the core and backbone of the platform? Why don’t you do something about this? We have so many questions that you could have easily given us answers for some of them. We need detailed answers. Why do you care about our private server side code?

Why are you doing this?
Nothing has sparked you to add more moderation. The moderation is already overloaded, and needs to be downsized, if I have anything to do with it. Please remove this terrible moderation addition. I see no benefits. Nobody can read my private code. It’s impossible.

Why aren’t you responding?
This “clarification” topic has sparked 1000 more questions than answers. Yet, you haven’t collected any of our questions and answered them. Is this deliberate ignorance of our questions?

Why do appeals not function?
Many users have been banned, and the appeals process is so bloated with non-developer appeals, that our appeals just get sent to a bot, or a staff member who doesn’t give a care about our concerns.

Please remove this terrible system and NEVER bring it back. Every other user on the DevForum is with me on this and we all hate it to the core.

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wooot well hopefully 1000 replies in 4 days will get someone’s attention. Some part of me doubts it though, considering most of the time roblox corp has it’s ears sewn shut and no dev rel team members have even commented on this as far as I’ve seen.

If my code is my own, I have a right to request roblox not to look at it, and so I do and if moderation is taken against me I will sue, that simple.

I feel like this could be benefical due to it providing better game security and less rulebreaking some devs break the roblox tos so much!This might help reduce the drawbacks from devs stealing content and triyng to claim it was thier own but it wasnt etc.

Exactly, and Roblox is way more user friendly then any other game engine I have ever seen, if i were to go to something like Unity or UE4 I would have to learn how to make everything my self and that would already be very time consuming. Like, trying to learn how to make your own models, textures, sound effects, and/or having to learn an entirely new programming language from scratch. Trying to learn how to make everything your self and then trying to actually make that game with all your assets you created after 1-2 years, that will probably take another few more years because try making a game like DOOM or Call of Duty by your self, yeah it will take a while won’t it? I feel like this is the only update in forever that has actually badly affected Roblox developers.

Well, I guess I should state a few things about this now that its been a few days.
Before I say anything about this I need to say that I don’t support this change for various reasons, but it is within the Terms of Service for Roblox to do this, even if it is overall useless.

Players (and exploiters) do not see the script source while in game.
The scripts are already compiled during runtime, so players only ever load in something that doesn’t even represent your script. Even exploiters cannot see your original code. There is absoluty no use for spending moderation resources on scripts that are copylocked, as Roblox has an authentication system to prevent unauthorized access of copylocked objects that are saved online.

Moderation is already poor.
When moderation on all other assets is already poorly handled, Roblox decided that it was a better course of action to put resources to moderate scripts which have never been an issue. Images and audio can take up to an hour to pass through the moderation process, and now Roblox has decided to add another black box moderation system on one of the most vital parts of their platform.

The automated system is poor.
Many developers have come out stating how their accounts have been deleted for having scripts that fixed issues with in-game bots that Roblox hasn’t even addressed. That’s like imprisoning a shop owner for having a security system.

Scripts can hold sensitive data, and this opens up an attack vector.
As someone who is certified by CompTIA as a cyber security specialist, it hurts to see a massive coorperation secretely add a system that could have major repurcussions to their service. Roblox has supposedly grown their moderation team by large numbers. The more people that have access to private code containing things like API keys and such, the more likely it is that one of these people could easily leak this private and sensitive information, either intentionally or not.

I don’t believe that this is all bad of a change, but for all scripts to be checked for moderation? That’s outrageous and a security risk. If Roblox wants to grow and allow for an environment of individual developers and small studios, they can’t act in a way that turns away more professional creators.

I hope that Roblox would release an official statement about why they added this change, and why they only announced it in a clarification. This clarifies nothing, and only makes developers confused, frustrated, and angry at these systems that only detract from the platform.

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Developers have had their account deleted for false postives in the automated system. Supposedly, a team is supposed to review the code. Its obvious that an automated system shouldn’t be so heavily relied upon as seen in these cases, but that closed source code can contain sensitive and non-PID information, such as API keys.

Exactly, and the moderation team relies on it too much. There are privacy concerns with letting people view our code, but for all other assets the moderation team SHOULD review the content to see if it is actually breaking the ToS.

This is not good. Roblox bots and moderators looking into your code for no reason? It’s not going to contain anything bad or important like a Passport ID. Though, this is kind of smart. Scripts included with a virus (or the script name is “Vaccine”), can be taken down and flagged. This might help decrease viruses in free models, but is extremely annoying for programmers.

How about we keep the spam to a minimum and discussion on topic so staff (who yes, are getting the feedback) don’t have to sort through hundreds of replies of junk to find any useful and genuine feedback which isn’t “roblox sucks viva la revolution!” :upside_down_face:.

If you have anything meaningful to contribute, do it. If you don’t, like an existing post which does.


Is this definitely the case? Having it explicitly clarified whether just the script is sent for manual review or if it’s the entire place file would be great (not sure whether it’s just the script given the quote has “flagged code or assets”).

Is the moderation team able to discern between inappropriate content and genuine code? I have implemented a parser for a certain language which happens to be named something which would most likely be automatically detected.

Adding onto the above point, is the appeals team aware of this policy and trained to effectively deal with appeals sent regarding it, such as clearly communicating the issue with the developer without them having to jump through hoops?

Given the invasive nature of this policy and the possible impact it could have on my places or account, it’d be great to have some more clarification.

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I have been doing offline mode in roblox studio for a few months.

But you won’t have much access to the toolbox or publishing features…

Guys don’t flood the thread. I understand flagging code is a meme and all but we’re making it very hard for staff to find useful replies. We’ve made our opinions clear on this update. (well more like a downdate.)

This thread is most likely gonna get locked because of the spam.

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For all of those who are in negativity about this: I understand the annoyance/irritation that Roblox has withheld this information for over a month now, but as I have been seeing with the responses this is being handled very very poorly. It would be very appreciative if we can step back for a bit and make sure what we say won’t let our emotions get the best of us when typing. At this point at time, it seems like many people here are posting 1-2 line responses which are too vague and causing too much clutter in this 1,000 reply thread, which can lower down to at least 200-ish if people were treating responses more maturely.

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