Clarification on code flagged for safety review

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#1143

TLDR; I love Roblox, don’t go down the wrong path, please work with us so we can work with you.

Hello. I have been on the Roblox platform since well… June, 2008. You probably don’t see me around much because I usually mind my own business, and I don’t speak up publicly about much of anything really. I tend to keep things private. I feel like I have the right to say something about this in a truthful manner. I am only going to keep this to one post, so excuse me if I go a bit off topic here. This comes from the heart though…

Roblox… please reconsider. I love this platform, and as you can see from all the other comments we all love your platform. Lots of us have put our blood, sweat, and tears to bring joy to the users that come to visit your website, to play our games on your servers. We don’t want to work against you; in fact it’s the opposite, we want to help grow your business because we all know how much this platform benefits not only us, but the millions of people who come to enjoy it as well. This platform has been a blessing to say the least. Think of how many lives you have impacted because this was created. All the new businesses made, all the new hope it gave people, it truly has brought imagination to another level.

Unfortunately, as the years go by it has always been on the back of my mind can I trust this company? Do I want to continue my endeavors on this platform? Can I legitimately jump face first into this market, with the trust that Roblox has my back?

These questions should sound familiar for creators on other platforms (which shall not be named.) It’s the same sort of situation though. You have to wonder what is going on in the background, what else are they not telling us? If were making Roblox money there should be enough transparency between the people who put in the time to make the content using their platform, and the company who puts in the time to make the platform for the creators to make content.

We’re suppose to be a team. Great teams don’t hide things from each other. They communicate with one another, they are truthful, they have leadership, they express their feelings with one another. I think the developer side of things has done a brilliant job of this. I feel like we have been fair to this point. We have always sucked it up when there was an update we disliked. This though…

This is another level. Why have you been looking at our information without asking for our permission first?

Imagine you’re on a sports team, while in school. Your coach comes along and tells the principle that he wants to see the teachers use a specific system to go through all the homework of every student on the team to find anything that violates the coaches “rules”. The teachers agree. That’s too much work for them to look through, so they hire a whole bunch of people to help go through all the homework from every student on the team. One of the people hired appears to have found something violating the rules. It’s eight sentences on your 10,000 word essay. You thought you were writing the essay for the teacher to grade, you didn’t know that it would be wrong to use your sports teams performance from two seasons ago as an example on a paper about physiology . Not to mention that this essay was written last year. It was a slip up. Can you even call it one though? It was an essay from a year ago after all. The teacher gives the paper to the coach, shows the coach the eight sentences that violate the “rules” and then proceeds to cut you from the team the next day. As time goes by more teammates start to wonder why students are slowly getting cut from the team. It gets to the point where outrage starts to form. The coach finally speaks up about it six months later. Informs the entire team that he has checked over their homework from the past few years to see if it violates the rules, and that their teammates have been cut from the team because of it.

Can you imagine how those students would feel with that coach? That is not a good relationship at all. It’s scary even. It creates fear. This would destroy the team internally. Future scholarships gone because of one coaches actions. He tried to go too far to protect the image of his team by digging into their personal information without asking.

I get that we agreed to the “Terms of Use” and “Roblox Community Rules”, but at what point do you change the information to the point it goes too far. That we end up agreeing to something that could be borderline illegal? What if we end up agreeing to something that violates our human rights?

This is LUA programming, it’s not something to take lightly. There is some very personal information in these scripts. There is information that some of us have worked tirelessly to put together. Were we suppose to have a clue that Roblox would budge in with a magnifying glass looking over all the work we do everyday?

This is a stressful time! Waking up to the news that somebody has been potentially looking over my scripts for who knows how much time. It’s not okay. Please take it from someone who has been there from nearly the beginning. Great platforms listen, work, and cooperate with the users, while maintaining a sustainable pace for profit in the process. They don’t mistreat, misjudge, tell lies, hide information, sell personal information, do things without asking first, and most certainly they don’t walk the line of what is legal and illegal. I am not claiming that Roblox does all of this. All companies do however… make mistakes.

The one saving grace about this is they could at any moment, apologize. It might not bring everyone back, but apologizing could really help in a situation like this. What they did was disrespectful to developers.

I do want to believe that this is it. I don’t want to see another situation like this where the developers are left scratching their heads wondering why they did things without our consent. Even something as simple as taking some of the top veteran developers and holding meetings with them could go a long way in the decision making process. It would help prevent outrage like this in the future. I want to believe this is nothing more than a mistake. Not another one of those platforms taking things too far to the point where the creators and the business separate from one another. Please think it over again Roblox! :pray:

Thank you for reading this!
-Love, Bananacb

19 Likes
#1149

Yup, this wasn’t a necessary thing to do. If it’s the developers private code, they are just making it public in some sense.

2 Likes
#1150

The fact that were being punished for something so small, and not even available to the public is unbelievable and concerning. Seeing as this topic has almost 1090 replies at the time of writing this, that’s a giant red flag. As far as I can see, not even a single staff member has responded to any of these concerns.

Put yourself in our shoes, how would you feel if I invaded all your private code without telling you, and then end up possibly terminating your account and/or game? The code isn’t even available to the public!!

2 Likes
#1151

To be frank, I understand the negativity about the community. But the security of oneself and others should always trump convenience of coding. Although as much as I dislike this update because it won’t benefit myself, I will support it for the benefit of others and their safety. I want to be clear, I dislike this change. But I also want to be just as clear that I cannot be against something that is pushing towards making sure young developers are safe. I don’t want to sound rude, but it seems to me that this negativity comes mostly from caring about oneself (even though I highly doubt moderator action will be taken place for something we did extremelyyy long ago), but if this is for the future of younger developers, I have to fully support it.

#1152

Also just to add, I would like to thank roblox for now making me spend hours on end going through each of my own game checking for profanity that I will have to do tomorrow. I have more than 400+ places because of a bad habit I have that I now have to check.

1 Like
#1153

I would rather Roblox use this system on The Free Models they usually have code that can ruin your game and even one can make your game have a GUI when you start the game saying swear words. This also might now be good for the devs who have extra chat filters to stop bots and common filter bypasses. Roblox Mods are great and all, but sometimes make mistakes like umm let’s just say you have made an Extra Chat Filter for your game and use it to block Bad Words and common bypasses. If Roblox’s Mods don’t check through your code entirely it will be removed and Moderation will be taken on your account.

“I like all my code being private for my Devs and/or myself”

Roblox should remove this. One day this will have to be changed and fixed because it can get REALLY annoying for Devs.

1 Like
#1154

This now makes the Roblox moderation seem much worse. It’s bad enough already, for example: instead of just denying an uploaded asset, you have to warn people, now that’s potentially my chance of being able to DevEx gone right out of the window, and we haven’t even got to game reviewing yet.

The “new” place “snooping” that the moderation team is doing, as a developer it feels disturbing that a Roblox moderator can almost walk into any game and take a nice big look at all of the code, keys/tokens. This brings in the possibility that your game could be leaked to the public (by accident or on purpose). I believe game owners should also be notified when their game has been “scanned” by Roblox.

Now, I’m currently in the progress of making a management game thing. The game allows the user to interact with Discord features. The UI also has the word “Discord” in it. However, I’ve taken extra steps to ensure users who don’t have permission to view Discord links (retrieved from PolicyService) will be immediately removed from the game - no “Discord” text will be shown to them at all. Could this possibly get me into trouble with Roblox moderation?

3 Likes
#1155

This doesn’t improve safety if there are already moderation issues to begin with. Yes, we care about ourselves because it will mainly affect us with how poor moderation currently is and has been for a while. We understand that this is for the sake of safety, but no one is going to see the code in the first place. There is no point at all for code to be moderated unless the code is open source such as being in a free model or in an uncopylocked place. That’s where the issue lies, we don’t want our code being viewed by anyone even if its roblox. Some scripts contain sensitive information such as API keys which we don’t want it getting out there. But in the end, this will just be a waste of moderation power.

#1156
#1158

You understand that by the time it gets moderated the other person in the team create could have already copy and paste it somewhere else or already have seen it, therefore, proving my point of this being a major waste of time of moderation power. Otherwise, are you trying to say that before a script can work in the team create it first needs to pass through moderation because that’s the only way that this safety can be enforced? But it still stands that no one will ever see our code in the first place.

#1159

My apologies…
I have discussed with another user about this. If I am not mistaken, after I discussed with somebody this change has been out for over a year. Big shame for Roblox for not saying anything about this. But, if your accounts are still existent even with these changes, then what’s the issue to complain about worryong of your account getting deleted?

Anyways, I have made it abundantly clear about the reason behind this change. Security to prevent young developers from getting their locations exposed which can be extremely dangerous. Now, I did not say I am for the moderation of vulgar language. Anyways, as what I have read there doesn’t seem to be verifiable action upheld for scripts with swear words. In fact, I have seen it verified to be the opposite. There has been many games, like Phantom Forces, that have scripts with swear words (Don’t ask me how I know, someone showed me), but no action is taken place for years. And I don’t believe that’s a bad thing for scripts to contain swear words in the first place, so what’s the massive fuss about “I’m going to get banned for x and y being shown in my script,” when you likely aren’t gonna be moderated in the first place because of it?

1 Like
#1160

I didn’t liked this update because I don’t want anybody to see my codes. I’ve made a super secret once too, but I can’t trust any moderators. I know that they are owned by Roblox but still I don’t feel comfortable when somebody is looking at my secret codes. Rather than that, I was going to release my new game soon but with this update I don’t feel comfortable at all. In this point, I’ll keep my game private until further notice about this update.

#1161

Were going into 1100 very shortly, and still no response?

roblox needs to respond, even if its not gonna be removed, they need to respond in anyway regarding this topic, and they need to do it fast, otherwise the community, as shown today, is getting more angrier as were left in silence with our questions, and what’s going to happen later on down the road.

2 Likes
#1162

But if one issue isn’t there to complain about then there is another.
This is my issue and these are the questions I have so far.

Is this why resources on preventing malicious assets into the game barely function? Such as malicious models and inappropriate 18+ games?

How does this prove to be effective of what I’m under the assumption is the past year?

Why continue this practice despite the still growing problem of malicious assets?

#1163

The issue with this change is that everyone within this forum seems to want that “100% perfect and flawless solution,” and it irritates me that people would enter threads with a negative mindset before analizing the purpose of information.

If you haven’t realized, it has drastically improved compared to the past. Whenever I see or hear about a game showing up like that, before it was hours but now these types of games will get taken down almost immediately or within 30 minutes. This problem barely exists anymore, and discussion about it is almost obselete. Although I appreciate your concerns, I want to comfort you by saying that this problem is almost nonexistent now.
Note: I have been involved and played Roblox since 2011, and I have noticed a drastic improvement compared to the past.

2 Likes
#1165

Yes, the games get taken down within’ 30 minutes because they appear on the front-page for everyone to see. There are still inappropriate games with low player counts that can exist hours on end. But from what it sounds like when they review ANY asset it doesn’t prove effective against malicious models with backdoor/malicious code. You can check the first page of free models with the majority of it being obviously botted and of course plagued with these malicious scripts.

For the game aspect, I don’t understand how they don’t have some sort of automation/asset matching bot to check for duplicate games.

But the main focus of this since it’s the biggest issue is the malicious models. I see little to no impact and no automatic handling of sudden appearing models that were obviously botted.

#1167

This is extremely stupid. The only scripts that should be moderated are free models or scripts that show things that are visible to players. The hell are you thinking ROBLOX? So now people are being banned for stuff nobody else can see, and you are seeing personal and private information without informing people for several months. Way to go, you better remove this or a lot of ROBLOX developers will quit and your moderation system will be worse than it already is. Maybe fix a real issue such as the broken as hell filter before fixing nonexistent ones.

#1170

One important thing:
The F9 dev console is not filtered, and is accessible for all players. It is important that text that may appear in it is either filtered (like if you are debugging a chat filter) or is safe for everyone. If scripts cause an error, it also prints to the dev console. This is one reason that scripts and their contents should use safe language.

That being said, I still agree with most comments on this thread.

1 Like
#1171

I mean… Just about 5 months ago I got banned for 3 days by accidentally uploading a mesh from an online source and didn’t know there was a texture with something inappropriate on it. I still don’t know where to find the model and where to find this texture on my files, but what it confirmed to me was that Roblox is realllly quick at moderating and it’s incredible how they can get moderations done so quickly. But what’s great is that when these incidents happen, I just email Roblox about the issue and they would generally understand.

The main issue with this is what when something is a 3D model, it is basically impossible to have a bot somehow recognize that pieces of bricks form something bad. So, if something doesn’t happen, reporting is how it reaches to moderation for review. If something doesn’t get moderated in time, then likely it is because something hasn’t been flagged for some time as well.

Invasion of who’s privacy? By submitting your game to Roblox you’re literally giving them your authority to read your game. In addition, I highly doubt those who are moderating scripts will be someone who is random/untrusted, considering

What confirms that his case is because of Roblox’s fault, and not from any mistake? Most terminations happen from multiple violations, not just one.

And when the parents read the Roblox label of “For children,” they put their child in Roblox’s hands in hopes that the engine is safe. By saying “It’s the parent’s responsibilities” as a valid excuse, you might as well remove all security measures and blame the parents if a child becomes missing for leaking their address to a stranger on Roblox.

2 Likes
#1172

Why wasn’t the f9 dev console disabled to all players unless we white listed them? If that’s the only justification Roblox had while settling on this decision than whoever pitched this concept isn’t qualified for their job who should’ve been fired immediately.

1 Like