Okay, time for another big post.
Roblox moderation is terrible to the point that devs have to get independent moderation for their own games. This same moderation is what’s committing these egregious breaches of privacy for developers. Until the entire moderation pipeline relating to this policy is open and clear to every developer, this policy should not be enforced. Not only is it an egregious breach of industry standard, even for children’s games, black box moderation policies in this particular sector are only harmful to the platform. I can see keeping the chat filter nebulous, and can see the reasoning behind automated moderation (Even when it false-positives otherwise intolerably often) on publicly visible assets.
The sad thing is, most devs will just lay down and take any changes Roblox pushes without doing anything. Right now I recognize that part of the outrage is due to lack of information (which roblox is notorious for on the moderation front) and that should honestly be their first step towards resolving this. However, devs also need to stand up for themselves and, particularly, organize to better get their points across to Roblox regarding any issues we see. Right now, Roblox is leveraging our utter disorganization and distrust of each other to make us pushovers for highly questionable policies.
We need to stop being so susceptible to accepting these changes by actually getting to a state where we can conduct these discussions civilly and diplomatically. If Roblox thinks they’ll get shouted down by the devs, they’ll just wait for the devs to get tired and give up, from the looks of things.
Also,
There were several top contributors and community sages that did not brush off this policy. That said, I do believe more “successful” developers are more okay with this because they already receive great leeway in the otherwise tyrannical moderation system, gaining incredibly improved response times and clarity.
That said, I believe that this overstep is a wonderful time for Roblox to start making their machinations less black-boxy and more transparent and positive, particularly where it counts (particularly in moderation, which lags behind in transparency significantly compared to both other platforms’ customer service and moderation as well as transparency standards set by the other parts of the platform). The team working on the core engine do this spectacularly already and have pushed out a continual streak of purely positive changes, and doing this across the board where possible as well as providing better tools so developers can know if they are compliant beforehand would be a certain step in the right direction.
I will, however, persist in that this policy should not be enforced until the above has been completed.
The last thing we need is more stuff to get stressed about in the present time.
