You’re not helpful when you just refer to a mythical algorithm. What do you want the algorithm to check for that won’t trip false positives?
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.
2 Likes
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.
1 Like
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.
1 Like
Some findings from research into the matter. There have also been changes implemented such as:
- 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.
3 Likes
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).
1 Like
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.
A very similar topic was discussed here: Hide severely disliked games from the front page - #15 by Darkmist101
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”)
2 Likes
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.
1 Like
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.
That you know of. Count the number of interns who have made a “stop botting” thread after gaining access to internal details. Your concerns are unwarranted.
To the community: please stop making threads like these. Adding +1 to the pile of hundreds we already have is not going to resolve the issue any more quickly. Roblox is already aware of the issue.
4 Likes
“Your concerns are unwarranted.”
I’m glad you think my concerns are unwarranted, but I simply don’t care because that is honestly a very arrogant and rude thing of you to say.
“It wouldn’t satisfy Roblox users anyway, since they whine about everything”
“To the community: please stop making threads like these.”
Also, you seem to have quite a dislike for the community and generally come off quite arrogant. Maybe you don’t mean to come off arrogant, but that’s how I perceive it. You always seem to think you know better than everyone here on the DevForum, and honestly, you make it seem like a less of a welcoming community. All I did was post one idea to try to combat a problem plaguing Roblox that is hurting the community, and you immediately come at me telling me that my concerns are unwarranted and that I’m wrong.
1 Like
This entire post just seems like unwarranted lashing out against EchoReaper, someone who’s been contributing to the developer forums for as long as they’ve been around. He says these things because there are n threads that are a general “stop scam games” request, which don’t help or solve anything. The engineers are working hard to fix it and already have internal measures in place. There is nothing positive to be gained from these threads.
1 Like
I’m glad he’s contributed to the developer forums for a long time, but coming off and saying things like my concerns are unwarranted is just uncalled for and a very arrogant thing of him to say to me. And frankly, I take that is an insult what he said and I’m sure you or anyone else in my place would too. Also, for someone here in the DevForum with a special role, he shouldn’t be attacking the community saying that all they do is whine because that is quite inappropriate in itself too. He is also misrepresenting Roblox with that special role he has.
Also, maybe the engineers are working hard to fix it and have internal measures in place, but nobody is actually seeing anything positive coming from these changes that you guys keep trying to claim to exist with no evidence to support your claim. I understand the engineers have a tough problem to solve here, but the lack of acknowledgment from them on this issue is why so many people are making these requests and posts because we are being lead to believe that nothing is being done and that the problem is being ignored.
I’m not sure what you mean, because at the point they’re at right now if they were smart, there’d be no reason to not add in the likes on top of the thousands of players they have joining. Having a 9 to 1 dislike ratio makes the game look super suspicious, and if botters were worried about they I’m sure they would have already implemented a step to combat that and add in the likes.
Most (if not all) of the dislikes come from real players who actually get scammed, there’s no reason for a botted account to dislike the game they want to make to the front page. And it’s not like the suggested program/algorithm would wait for a few days to see if the likes come back up. As soon as it hits the threshold of say 5,000 total likes, if there are 80% dislikes the game is automatically flagged.
What I’m saying is the bots don’t like the game at this point because they have no reason to. People get scammed by it regardless of how many people dislike it. Adding an arbitrary “a game must have X like/dislike ratio” will just make it so the bots will automatically like their game. Your solution solves nothing and may only make things worse because the games will have a much higher like/dislike ratio (because all the bots will now start liking the game).
1 Like
Yeah I get what you’re saying there, but my question is why haven’t they already done that? The scam games on the front page already have a horrible dislike to like ratio, so to make it look more legitimate wouldn’t botters already have tried liking their scam games?