Community Standards are too vague in certain sections

Abcreator · May 17, 2023, 7:44pm

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to plan my Roblox experience knowing that it won’t be in-breach of the community standards due to how vague certain clauses currently are.

Example #1

Many-parts of the community standards are very specific and those are not the parts that concern me. My issue is with the incredibly vague sections of the community standards, such as the “Roblox Economy” section. One part of this section states the following:

Using the group payout system in a fraudulent or misleading manner; including offering payment in Robux for acting as a model for assets, joining groups, referring members, or role-playing in experiences.

“Including” implies that this is not an exhaustive list, what else is also deemed fraudulent or misleading? Would offering random users of my group Robux count as fraudulent? Would paying my in-experience map creators (who don’t work in Studio but rather build in game) be deemed ‘roleplaying in experiences’? This clause is simply way too vague to be able to determine if my experience is in breach of this policy before release. Anytime I decide to use group payouts to pay someone who isn’t necessarily a developer for me, I’m constantly asking myself if it would fall under the policy, this is something that I shouldn’t have to worry about yet do due to how vague it’s described.

Example #2

A quote from the “Solicitating Donations” section:

We also don’t allow our community to solicit donations for a charitable cause on Roblox, including:

In-experience prompts for users to donate Robux toward a crowdfunding campaign

Claiming that a transaction is associated with a fundraiser

Stating to users that some amount of sales proceeds will be directed toward a cause

Again with the “including”, it’s clearly used so often so Roblox can be more broad and catch out people who find loopholes however makes the policy too vague to understand. In this case, am I allowed to encourage people to directly donate to charities irl? Again, quite unclear, the policy doesn’t mention it, but then again, our dasterous word “including” means that we simply don’t know-

Example #3

In “Disruptive Content and Behavior”:

Using bots that are programmed to run disruptive tasks

What’s a disruptive task!? This is outrageously vague, is my hypothetical bot that queries the games api for my current player count once per minute deemed disruptive? I’d hope not yet we simply can’t have an answer to that due to how vague they made the Community Standards.

Example #4

Finally (yet certainly not the final issue, there are hundreds of more clarification errors that need fixing yet I simply can’t list them all) in the “Evading Safety and Security Systems”:

Using VPNs to mask your location in order to gain unauthorized access to Roblox, including to a specific feature or account

How about when my access to such feature is authorised, such as logging into my own account from a country I’m not normally in (mass location changes can sometimes cause impossible captchas, but that’s a story for a different day), again however, the Community Standards has let us down since it mentions that using a VPN to access a specific account is not okay, but also states that it applies to unauthorised access only? In this case, we have a contradiction that can’t be solved! Also, how about when the feature is available yet slightly different between regions, for example, I had gift card credit on an account I registered via VPN via the US before the policy change, does the currency difference make this unauthorised access nowadays if I were to log into that account again, I surely hope not!?

To add salt to the wound, if you find any grey areas throughout the Community Standards, there’s absolutely no way to get clarification, you basically have 3 options:

Ask the DevForum, maybe someone has gotten in a similar situation
Just release and pray you don’t get moderated
Scrap the idea

All 3 of these options are terrible and I truly hope clarification can be given in these “grey areas”.

If this issue is addressed, it would improve my development experience as I would be able to release more Roblox experiences knowing that I definently will not be moderated due to a vague Community Standards rule!

cpguy5089 · May 18, 2023, 11:14am

This rule is in place to assumedly give them a reason to get rid of scammers/phishers using those claims (even though theres a dozen reasons already in place, and they don’t even get rid of them to begin with…)

At the time of this post, it’s not enforced properly across the board/is another “double standard” type rule (source: Double Down is claiming “you can earn Robux by hosting minigames. The more games you host, the more Robux you can earn!”

They also misquote the rules stating “selling access to games is allowed”, despite the fact that’s only allowed through the paid access games feature, but that’s not the topic of this section

This isn’t too vague/broad in my opinion, at least for the examples provided in the rule (in short, any sort of charity work related to Robux isn’t allowed, and that’s outlined fine) - I think that “including” as opposed to “including, but not limited to” is the very thin line between vague and written well. I’m not a lawyer so I dunno how it’d hold up in court, or any serious sort of appeal for anything to arise around that rule, but that’s how I’m reading it.

I do believe that saying something like “Donate to [well known charity]” should be fine though, as long as you aren’t implying you can do that on something specific (be it your game, or their official website, or whatever)

And of course bots that generally interrupt user experience (including but not limited to boosting player count, spamming comments, or even just a singular bot that silently follows a user everywhere they go)

This rule got put in place because of people who get IP bans, as well as people who were changing their location to get put into A/B tests they weren’t supposed to be in (I believe that display names was the most widespread occurrence of something like this happening, where certain locations got display names first as a test and people were VPNing into those locations to get display names on their accounts early)

There are far better rules out there to pick if you really wanted to show off Roblox being deliberately vague in their wording so they can enforce it on random people (notable examples relating to decals and audios)

Abcreator · May 18, 2023, 3:57pm

The point of “this is what the rule intends” unfortunately doesn’t hold up, I’ve read enough contracts to know that you have to assume the worst in cases such as this. While the moderation of assets rules are certainly vague too, generally you’ll get a warning at most for non-repeat offences, much less of a punishment than the outright bans other clauses of the standards can give you.

While you certainly make a point that these aren’t intended to mean what I state they are implying. I’m making the point that these simply can’t be vague due to their legal and important nature, if I ever have to question if what I’m doing is against the rules and can’t determine if it is, chances are is that the rules are too vague. Out of every contract I’ve personally ever signed or agreed to, the community standards is the only one that’s left me confused with grey-areas. Again, thanks for your response although I still personally believe there is an issue here.