Roblox actually has more power here than you describe. DevEx motivates a lot of developers to keep working on their games, and if Roblox threatened retaliation with moderation, people would think twice before joining a unification like that (effectively a boycott?).
Personally I think your idea is a great one. I just don’t think it would work, and this post isn’t really the place to discuss it anyway.
Roblox has a lot of power, yes, but ultimately their whole business model is dependent upon developers.
I’d argue that places like this are also the perfect place to coordinate a response, but that’s just me.
See, the gamble that devs would be taking with a boycott would be basically “can we do this big enough to warrant a response and make it a PR disaster for them to respond with moderation actions”, and that’s honestly why I doubt anyone will end up doing it successfully. I’d love to see it happen, and I‘ll be putting in the tools to participate myself, but I’m one dev without enough influence to even get a single other dev to follow suit, let alone enough of the community to actually deal some damage.
They can still punish developers for retaliating. If they’re harsh enough they can scare other developers into staying on their platform, staying stable that is.
PM me if you want to discuss this further.
This is unnecessary because I am the only person who sees my game’s code. No one else sees what my scripts contain. And in my opinion no one else than me should read my closed-source code. Moderating my script for curse words isn’t right because contents of that script aren’t visible to players, only me.
Roblox should chill with moderation instead of trying to make the platform more family friendly every day. This just feels like making Roblox 1000000% family friendly when 100% would be enough.
Definitely agree. This is something that needs to be implemented. I don’t want some automated flagging system determining whether or not Roblox should look at my code; Roblox should either get permission from the developer or have actual probable cause to start investigating my game.
I understand why Roblox would want to do this but doing it in this way is disgusting and unacceptable imo.
Hopefully I don’t do anything wrong here.
Is this a response to some safety at Roblox headquarters due to COVID-19? Just like YouTube is having an automated system so they can send staff home to be safe, I am wondering if this is in place for the staff team’s safety with the virus going around, if so keep it up!
No, this is so developers don’t put naughty language, personal info, etc in their code, not at all in relation to COVID-19.
Ah, alright. I was just wondering because it seemed like a whole team of people would fully manually review scripts for games like Jailbreak, etc.
Just making sure it isn’t an automatic placement where we can get incorrectly flagged like cough anon74648183/PlayCrate/his team
Roblox, what in the world is this? Have you not read the other posts regarding this topic? Nobody (okay, maybe a few) likes this, hundreds of developers on your platform disagrees with this change. You are punishing the developers on this platform, and are giving those who really violate your ToU (by accessing our code unauthorized) a possibility to get us punished. Who can report scripts? Anyone?
Additionally, you give us no way to store secrets safely, so they have to be in the code, which is the worst security practice you can have. And then you decide to out of nowhere, start letting people read our code? And again, who cares if there is a swear word.
Refer to this: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/sorry/448299/46?u=1thenoobestnoob
Why do we get punished if the player is not even meant to see what’s going on? The one and only scenario I would even consider to allow Roblox moderators to review code would be when there is inappropriate content being visible. Then, and only then, I can agree. But, reports on inappropriate content in the scripts that are not visible and not even meant to be visible?
I’m sorry for being harsh, but when you’re this harsh with your developers, I’m not letting that pass. Please, before even remotely considering to go through with this change, I kindly request you to fix your platform so that our trust to you can be re-established. You are pushing the developers of this platform away, and by creating a topic about this months after we had to find it out the hard way, it does not look good.
We developers have suffered downtime several times just these two weeks that affected communities, income, and development work. You push on with updates we appreciate, but don’t need at the moment. Where is the proper developer hub we have requested for a long time? In addition, I see good developers not being invited to RDC (which might get canceled, anyway), and that’s heart-breaking.
You are a company worth billions, and yet these simple things pass. Several people in the community consider creating their own dev hub because we’re struggling with the one we have, despite many people talking about it. I am personally creating an extension so that the devhub will be better.
And pretty much everyone knows that if you advertise your game, or just launched, and the platform is struggling = players are lost, possibly permanently. Which you can read more about in berezaa’s article here:
And again, why haven’t video star creators that are obviously breaking your rules in front of hundreds of thousands of users not received any kind of punishment?
Some of them post videos on how to get free Robux, and make websites where you watch ads for Robux. Which in itself would get a developer banned without hesitation. And they are allowed to do this. And now, you want to moderate us for what nobody sees, and break our trust to you by letting other people read our code without even asking us for this change?
I have complained about this previously, you being non-transparent, and only choose to post things people have noticed after we start complaining about this. A topic about this is appreciated, but taking this long? I expected at least a massive post answering questions we have asked about this previously, but no. Here’s a topic where I address this issue: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/sorry-again/406399
Roblox, I like this platform, but you have crossed the line. Fix things that are crucial to developers and players first. Stability, chat, developer tools, the website and more. Then, maybe I will be more welcoming to the system I don’t want but can respect.
Duh, obviously. I feel like if I send a discord popup on my game, they would ban me for a century. not a century, but weeks.
I sincerely agree. For the most part, Roblox is being an over-protective platform like Club Penguin.
What if this specially-trained team or the system cannot read your code (e.g obfuscation).
Cheerio cheerio bye bye to your account?
I would agree for this system to be in place for free models and assets being published, but the games? Unless the game is reported we should not have our code read, I personally store a lot sensitive data that I do not want anyone else to have access to, such as keys.
I feel so unsecure about this rule
First of all, I have my APIs going to run Trello and actively running to see something happens. Literally, when I post a card on my Trello, then imagine the system would detect something suspicious on the string that the function ran. The system may flag it and send it to the special mod team that would probably decide to suspend my account or not. For the most part, Roblox is just becoming an over-protective platform now.
Like others have said, the system would trace every code you write, then it detects something suspicious, which then you get banned or suspended for a certain amount of time. Literally, ROBLOX. Just cause our code may contain something so suspicious doesn’t mean you can suspend our account as you terminate our accounts.
For god sake, Roblox was meant to be “powerful imagination.” Doesn’t that mean that we have the right to develop wonderful imaginations our minds can powerfully imagine? Now, we see Roblox as “an over-protective platform”
I find this not very interesting to other developers. Most developers may start quitting Roblox as their scripts are being reviewed and with the sense of it, they can be banned for making something suspicious. Roblox should definitely put this to a change, whereas it should be the game that needed to be on a review, not scripts.
How about the scary horror games? Would they just be deleted and now most of the games we will play now are family-friendly?
Concluding to my topic, it should be the free models and games. Those ones are most critical to Roblox with the scamming, hacking, and malicious stuff that destroys your game/account.
IMO how you write your code should NOT affect moderation unless it is open sourced. The fact that I can get banned for something that only I’ll see is a bit concerning, especially because I used to use vulgar language in my code and it was never shown to the player, it was only seen by myself as the games are private anyway. I’ve already been moderated for a private place once before (I think because of a Guillotine? I was never given a direct reason), and the fact that now my old games can get me moderated for their code is really concerning. Friends I have in team create also like to use vulgar language in their code and the fact that their actions can potentially get me moderated is also troubling.
I know many who have already fallen victim to this in the past, their ToS-abiding games get taken down due to how they’ve written their variables.
As others have pointed out, there’s also no easy way to automatically determine real life threats/personal information as it could just be ficticious data used for the purpose of roleplay or world-building.
I am happy about the increased transparency, but as others on the thread have said, there is a need for a bit more. As a programmer and developer, I feel very strongly about the code I write. For me, writing a piece of code is a bit like taking a picture of my face; it almost feels like a part of me. Most of us wouldn’t like our personal pictures viewed by strangers without explicit permission, so I think it would be fair to, at the very least, let developers know when code is being accessed. I would also prefer to know precisely who is accessing the code. Could there also be a system where, if my code has been automatically flagged, I get the option to remove the asset without it being reviewed by people?
I would also like clarification on what “personally-identifiable information” means here. Sometimes freely usable scripts require me to include a verbatim copyright notice, such as ”Copyright Nomen Nescio (c) 2010–2020” in their comments or in game credits. Is the author’s name considered personal information here?
Finally, I personally can see one reason why this review system might be useful. While there is currently not a known way to gain access to server-side scripts, all software contains bugs, and I believe such a bug may appear in the future. After all, there have been bugs like that in the past. I have complete faith that Roblox staff are taking all measures to prevent that from happening and are very much capable of it, but they’re just humans after all. The argument that code is private only holds in the case that these safety measures work as intended. If they don’t, harmfully written code may cause a lot of harm.
My view is the following and is in the scenario the code should only be accessible to you (not a free model or whatever):
No player can view server code so I don’t see why we can’t write what we want there,
If a player is viewing client code they are exploiting and I don’t see why roblox is still protecting them at that point.
Ah god damn it, @byc14 @TrippyV - now they will see us flirting through commented sections 
Jokes aside, I think it’s vital for Roblox to ensure Player and Developer safety, by observing fishy or even endangering information used on games.
Obviously, when we think about our privacy, it’s a bit unsettling to know there are people we don’t know looking at our code (and probably laughing at our face 
). I feel like this is the same debate as always, regarding privacy and safety. It’s really hard to balance these in a way that suits everyone.
That said, I do appreciate the transparency Roblox is offering us; and understand that the safety review might be necessary to prevent further and worse issues.
This post leaves more questions than it answers.
First and foremost, let me point out that Roblox is not making any distinction between open-source and closed-source code, so it is highly unlikely that they differentiate both when it comes time to review. For the sake of argument, lets start from the assumption that Roblox is reading all our code, as long as it’s in a published game. This leaves a few major question:
Who is reading our code?
Seeing as the moderators are specially-trained and likely have knowledge of Lua, are they bound by a non-compete clause?
Is there a distinction between moderation for client-visible code and server-sided code?
Are comments affected? Is this dependent on question 3?
So if I have a script that contains a table of words to filter that I & my moderation team deem inappropriate to be used in my game due to the Roblox filters not catching them, this risks moderation action for having such a system? I don’t currently have this system implemented, but I was planning on it.
Edit: Nevermind, the bottom of the post seems to clarify this - i’ll make it clear above the table that it is used to filter words that we deem inappropriate.