The frontpage is merely being taken over by scammers botting scam games. Rarely do I go on the front page to not see one anymore, and this is becoming very problematic. Not only does it make Roblox appear as a lower quality platform, but it puts children at high risk too. Parents may also ban their children from playing on the platform because they want to keep them safe from these scams. Not only does this hurt Roblox as a platform, but it hurts each individual developer and their projects.
I believe the only solution to these scam games being botted to the front page is by Roblox engineers developing an algorithm that will attempt to detect scam games. If the algorithm marks a game as a scam game, then the game will not be allowed to appear on the games page until it is reviewed by a moderator.
While I know the idea of Roblox engineers creating an algorithm to detect scam games sounds like a simple idea, I am aware of the work that would need to go into it. However, it is definitely neccessary that Roblox creates and algorithm or takes other steps to finally start combating the insane amount of scamming on Roblox which is yet to be solved.
If the solution was easy the problem would’ve been solved already. I can think of really easy bypasses for everything you’ve brought up.
What does this even mean? This is extremely subjective and unlikely to factor in every edge case.
The creators of these games are the same type of people who probably have a huge backlog of old stolen accounts.
Which they won’t because it’s a new account every time, either by join date or it’s just an account that’s uploading the place for the first time.
They can just buy an ad/sponsorship then.
Again, they have backlogs of stolen accounts. This also doesn’t factor in that new players join Roblox everyday and may all hop onto one game at once.
I know it’s not an easy problem to solve nor did I ever claim it was an easy problem to solve. But just because it’s a hard problem to solve doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be solved. In the end, everyone is suffering here and Roblox is yet to take an initiative to combat these scam games after years of everyone begging and pleading with them.
Also, these are only some ideas for what the algorithm could be checking for. Although, I have ended up just removing them since people are already focusing on just some algorithm ideas I tossed out there rather than the idea of an actual algorithm that is used to detect these scam games. Roblox engineers will most certainly be able to design a better algorithm as they have the technical details on what data Roblox collects and has that can be used in the algorithm.
The issue is there’s no good way to solve it, not that it’s just difficult.
Flat out wrong. As said earlier, it’s impossible to completely stop them.
And they’ve been struggling with this for years. The simple suggestion to just “write an algorithm to detect scam games” is close minded and not helpful to anyone.
Oh good, they are working on the solution! Can you point me to where I can read up on the solutions and steps they’ve taken so far after all these years?
Never did I say that it was possible to completely stop the problem here, please don’t put those words in my mouth and I’m not sure where you got that idea from. I simply said it is time for Roblox to take a step to combat the issue implying that they must start somewhere.
An algorithm can actually can work quite well if it is able to detect and mark even a few scam games as scams so they don’t ever make it anywhere.
Combating scammers is a never ending battle just like combating hackers/exploiters.
With each “fix” comes a new vulnerability.
The front page algorithm and sorting has been changed countless times. Even the removal of tickets decision had anti bot reasons.
Automation only gets you so far because to know whether a game is a scam or not you have to analyze intent.
When you use the word solution, what you’re saying can get lost in language. Solution implies fixing a problem entirely.
There are a lot of things that Roblox can look for when designing the algorithm, and they shouldn’t be looking for just one thing either. However, an algorithm is possible as many companies such as YouTube use it in their comments section and various other things to detect spam, scams, phishing, etc.
If you haven’t already noticed, every single scam game to date follows the same pattern because it is only a bot that written to follow the same steps over and over. Often, these are accounts that were recently created and there game is barely anything it, usually just some sort of message and the default baseplate. Although, more importantly, these games will all of the sudden jump from 0 players to the front page. All of these things can be detected through an algorithm and marked as scams.
To prevent false positives, games marked as scams will not be automatically deleted, but instead will simply not appear on the games page until a moderator reviews the game.
Well I used to run a scam finding bot, and it worked very well. It’d base it on the title and description, 99% of the time it marked the right ones. Just based on title and description. It did need some manual intervention and what not once in a while, but even then, it was a simple-ish bot, I am sure Roblox could do way better than me. I was highly debating on making it auto-report, but didn’t.
Just games having “FREE ROBUX” would be super easy to find. Though at the same time, if they did, people would start doing like FREE R0B|_|X, etc.
You actually have given a great example on Roblox combating hackerrs/exploiters. Just a few years ago things were getting pretty bad, but Roblox took steps to patch exploits and offer developers tools to combat these exploiters. While there still are hackers/exploiters on Roblox, the damage they do has signfigantly dropped. I honestly can’t even remember the last time I was in the server with a hacker/exploiter.
Now if Roblox is able to do the same with scamming, then things would be a whole lot better for everyon.
Captcha to post on group for new accounts (did not stop bots)
Anonymized server lists for games
Miscellaneous new captchas that users legitimately using botting on the site have encountered
Roblox has worked on a lot more behind the scenes, but will never publish those publicly in their entirety because:
It helps botters find areas of the site not protected by countermeasures
It wouldn’t satisfy Roblox users anyway, since they whine about everything
It seems they did, and the games did start doing that. I’ve seen the names changed around from FREE ROBUX to BUX to the equivalent in special characters that resemble FREE ROBUX, etc. They’ve even started to copy the names of popular games. Definitely doesn’t work.
Exploit patching is a completely different beast from preventing scam games and isn’t a good analogy at all. One is a technical problem (you can program a server to filter out client requests), the other is a theoretical and logistical problem (how do you stop scam games from popping up in a way that they can’t get around and also doesn’t trip false positives).
While Roblox has taken a few small steps to combat scams on the platform, nothing you’ve stated here were steps taken to specifically combat botters botting scam games to the front page. And although they may do a lot more behind the scenes, it doesn’t seem to be working as the issue is progressively getting worse and worse.
Also, I do agree that Roblox should not solely look at the game title to try to detect if it is a scam or not, and I would not want them to do that as it can be easily bypassed. Although, a lot of these scammers are able to bypass the Roblox filter still as they are putting “Free Robux” and links to websites in the game titles themselves meaning players don’t even need to necessarily join the game at all to get scammed out of their accounts, givingout important and private creditals to these websites, etc.
And there I proposed a solution that’s much simpler than creating some magic bullet algorithm to remove “scam games” (which sounds impossible, because there are no hard points that define a “scam game”)
Your solution is not something that is workable either considering they already have tens of thousands of accounts to join the games, its one extra request to like them.
What exactly is your technical solution to this problem? You seem to be here combating every single possible solution, yet you are not providing any possible solutions to an actual problem that is scamming children out of their accounts, money, etc.
I don’t have a technical solution to the problem, that’s why I’m not suggesting one. I’m explaining why all your theoretical solutions help absolutely nobody.
The algorithm is meant to look for textbook definition scam games by looking at various data such as high player count jumps on new games, etc. It’s like how Google uses an algorithm to display you the best websites possible at the top of the list. They may not be able to definite “the top sites”, but they most certainly can look for obvious things like whether or not the website is responsive on mobile devices, does the website have a lot of content, etc.
Also, outright hiding or banning severely disliked games is not necessarily a viable solution on its own due to the bots being able to like the game.