It sounds like Roblox wants to check your comments too, which is unimaginably stupid for closed source scripts. Even for open source scripts, this whole idea of moderating the text in scripts is questionable at best. Who is Roblox seeking to protect with this? This helps almost nobody and potentially harms many.
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I think one of the possible reasons for this, is roblox wanting to protect well… Younger developers from bad language and such. That’s pretty much the only reason I see for this.
I would assume script moderation would only be useful for open source scripts. I guess we’re going to have to wait for a response from them to see what’s going down.
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Awful change. This should only ever apply to things intended for the public, like scripts within free models or uncopylocked games.
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This “update”, the Global China Policy update and how Roblox censored concerns about China’s influence in that thread, the lackluster response to developer requests for raised DevEx rates (quelled leading up to RDC by promising to implement great new monetization systems, which turned out to be the extremely lackluster Premium Payouts which provides like 1% of additional revenue with returns far lower than just selling gamepasses), all of the above.
Roblox has been on a streak of disappointment for the past couple of months and it’s starting to get to a point where I would look on the 80% that Roblox would get from my hard work with sorrow that the fruits of my labor are going to such a mismanaged and malevolent organization. Really, I honestly think developers need to unionize. Roblox’s life blood is in the work of its developers. Without developers, Roblox would be nothing. It’s time that Roblox developers step up.
[Edit: Almost forgot to mention, Roblox servers have been taking a crap constantly for the past month or so, which I think is unacceptable for a company now worth billions. Roblox has only grown over the years, but their treatment of developers I feel has only gone further and further backwards since the high point of DevEx being introduced. Roblox is growing out of touch with the people responsible for their core income, and they need to make amends before they lose legitimacy as a development platform.]
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I’m not much of a programmer, but I can see how bad this change will be.
It’s a similar thing where Roblox filters the search-bar… why? What’s the point? No-one except those behind the PC can see what’s written in the search-bar.
In fact, since it’s only supposed to show you results based on what you wrote, it won’t even share it to anyone.
If anything, make it apply to public content only and leave private stuff alone. It almost feels like a privacy violation. 
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Does this mean they will be doing a deep cleaning of the toolbox models? There is still the same “Infector” “Fire” “Vaccine” Spread" scripts in every other model, and a few with foul language. Some of them more than a decade old…
Asking for a friend.
(I have to agree, this seems a little out of touch with the needs/wants of developers here)
Perhaps offline editing would be a better direction to take.
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We’ve actually been asking for improved security on malicious code in toolbox and plugins. This includes things like backdoor plugins, instance abuse, code stealing, etc.
The way Roblox handled it, however, is not efficent.
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This shows Roblox is still out of touch with moderation issues raised by players and developers in the past. As much as this is your platform and you want to protect users this is not the way to do it and will overall just harm or turn away developers from the platform who have concerns that they may be moderated/terminated for false positive detections.
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As a non-progammer (in regards of the Roblox platform), when I first read this post, I thought “Why is everyone so upset about this?” - I thought people wanted Roblox to spend the time to manually review reports rather than having just a machine automatically pick out things and then censor them.
But I decided to read all of the replies, and even as someone who doesn’t understand what kind of information is needed in most code, I can already see a huge security risk for everyone involved. (So as someone who’s as ignorant as me on the subject can see how this update is an AWFUL idea, I don’t understand how trained professionals think this is a GOOD idea.)
As someone who knows what an API key is (hardly), the fact that isn’t protected and now outsiders can view those keys - Isn’t good.
I tried to justify the reasoning for this change to myself. “Well, why would someone need to swear in their code?” - Well, does it matter why? After reading the replies, I saw people would jokingly add notes to themselves to motivate themselves, make themselves laugh or just to express anger in the only way they knew how. Well, then why is that going to be a punishable offense if nobody but the developer can see it?
I then thought “Well, I can see this being an issue in team create. I can see users being inappropriate in team create.” - But then I realize that almost every developer in the replies has agreed that public assets/games should be moderated and that team create should probably be moderated as well.
I also thought “Well, why wouldn’t anyone trust the Roblox staff team?” - You’d expect a big company worth billions would hire trained professionals who wouldn’t step boundaries. But my question was answered when everyone was saying “I can’t believe this is happening again,” - This has shown Roblox staff has not taken the time to try and gain the trust of their developers.
The fact the ENTIRE platform is based around the work of your developers, I thought this would be an EXTREMELY important of your priorities. (Gaining the trust of your developers.) - Roblox is slowly becoming solely user created - Events are now gone and now users host them. Games are all created by users. Groups are made by users. Clothes are made by users. Hats are now being made by users. Models are made by users and textures are made by users. The ENTIRE platform NEEDS developers.
But the fact NOBODY* here can trust your team to read their code is an issue in of itself and should not be a thing at all. Users are meant to trust the staff on this platform - but they don’t. Instead, Roblox hid behind their Roblox account to avoid giving a name to this update and staff are not responding to anyone’s worries. (In other words, they’re not attempting to repair their relationship with developers by leaving them in the dark.)
This is an update that is months old but they didn’t say anything about it. In the OP, they’ve already admit that they’re already running issues with staff falsely moderating code. You can word it in a nice way “that we’re all human, we all make mistakes” - but a mistake that can effect someone’s income or job or project and it isn’t and shouldn’t be taken lightly as it was in the OP. I don’t know the situation, so maybe the situation isn’t a huge deal overall, but it can be a huge issue in the future.
I’ve been able to take the time to listen to your developers and understand why they’re worried and why they need clarification. You should also take the time to listen to your developers.
- = Strong language. I know there was a few replies that supported it.
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I 100% agree with your point about manpower - this only protects exploiters from being exposed to controversial language while they are exploiting which in my opinion should automatically take away all their rights for roblox to protect hem from this language, furthermore parts of roblox such as customer service are already EXTREMELY understaffed so I fully support your point about resources being wasted.
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Will this moderation be moderating code from years ago, like Roblox moderation has been guilty of in the past? Should I be going through all of my places from when I first joined in 2013 when I was young and thought it was funny to name my variables innapropriately?
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To be fair, for the past month or so, Corona’s been going wild in different nations around the world. I’ve been having server issues with EVERYTHING for the past month. Roblox is doing things very wrong, but server handling is not near the top of that list
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This update seems to have a lot of flaws. A script could say rude words using some sort of bytecode, concatenation, string manipulation, etc. It would probably take up to five or six hours to moderate, due to how easy it is to hide string manipulation. Knowing that ROBLOX only has about 400 moderators( i think ), script moderation would take a LOT of time.
If script obfuscation will be against the rules though, a lot of infected free models will be removed from the toolbox. So I think preventing script obfuscation would be good. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Edit: Looks like obfuscation won’t be against the rules, and a lot of people actually use it with good intentions. People will just obfuscate their explicit words… The more rules you give, the more loopholes the users find, and the harder it is to enforce.
Edit 2: Seriously? I just realized, people can use HttpService and retrieve explicit words and/or personal information. This update is useless, period.
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But if anything this moderation will be promoting script obfuscation. People have sensitive URLs and keys and such in their scripts that they won’t want anyone to see, including moderators.
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Sadly banning obfuscation would actually make it worse, I know I obfuscate a lot of my client code as Roblox fail completely to protect any form of local scripts and module scripts, allowing anyone with a paid exploit to come in and swipe the source code.
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That means that anyone could just obfuscate their explicit words, though. This update is pretty nonsensical…
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That means that people could obfuscate their personal info & explicit words and set any ingame text to it, though. This update seems pretty useless in my opinion…
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I will defend them for a moment here. I fully support their Global China Policy post for devs that plan to market in China. If they are imposing Chinese restrictions on non-Chinese marketed products, then I will promptly add Roblox to the list of companies that are tainted by Chinese influence and cut all ties with the platform.
The censorship of developer concerns, however, is valid. They should be RESPONDING to developer concerns, not censoring them (It’s why we have half of these trust issues in the first place.)
That being said, I’ve been in massive support of developer unionization since the removal of events. I’ve been putting a monetization off-switch in every one of my projects (even ones that now seem like they won’t come to light due to platform limitations). I’m ready to flip them all to off whenever the community decides that they will heed this wisdom.
Another sad, sad fact is that neither Roblox nor the devs trust each other at all, which should not be the case. I should be able to have faith in that Roblox will consult me if they have a concern regarding my work so that I may defend it civilly. I should be able to have faith that they won’t shift their mod policies on a dime with no forewarning whatsoever and then use that shift to snipe my work all because I had something like 24 hours to adapt at most. I should be able to have faith that we’ll get at least a month’s notice when things are being deprecated or removed.
None of that exists. And Roblox doesn’t have faith in its devs as shouted by these policy changes. When our entire interaction in the platform is dependent upon good faith from both sides, why isn’t Roblox doing more to foster good faith?
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Imagine having some kind of key in a script that is used to access a 3rd party web service with HttpsService. Then… what if roblox accidentally leaked it or something.
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The thing is, we’re not saying that scripts can’t do bad. We’re saying that the only bad scripts CAN DO will be apparent ingame.
If we have a part named the f bomb, the player will never know unless an error concerning that part happens. And errors stop scripts, so it’s not a concern as devs would fix a part throwing an error rather quickly.
Most devs know what’s at risk. Filter replacement is apparent to all under 13 and some over 13 accounts. That’s why people don’t do it. But comments… variable names… and so on… I think everyone has put a little bit of sketchy language in at least one script. (I’ve done it when commenting on a line of code that fixes a particularly infuriating bug telling my future self to not touch at all costs)
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