Currently, there’s not too much that you can do with the default ROBLOX chat system, and I know that at RDCWest, it was mentioned that they had plans to make the chat more customizable/interfaced.
However, there’s no general timeframe on when this will become a real thing. Hence, I’d love it if we could have the very simple feature of adding chat messages to the chat with a custom name. This would be a pretty large step in at least allowing some basic interfacing with ROBLOX’s chat.
For example, perhaps I’d like to broadcast something in chat, under the name ‘Broadcast’, eg: “[Broadcast]: Some random event!”.
In the interest of preventing malicious applications of this feature, chat reported to the moderation logs should, obviously, point out whether they are real or not.
Another application of this is, perhaps, a RP server. You could make players say something and have it appear in the chat window in the spirit of roleplaying.
There are numerous applications for this relatively simple feature. It would be much appreciated by myself (and hopefully others) if this feature was available in the API.
My biggest concern would be that this would allow anyone to impersonate people in the chat, though that could be solved by just putting the name in brackets.
I totally agree with you - someone could do some really malicious things with this. That’s why I used brackets: like you said, that will subtly differentiate real chat from forced chat.
I created a custom chat GUI, I plan to extend on it. Like remove line break. It has support for sending custom messages to players, like notifications. I may make it a public script.
Just to point out, it’s already pretty easy to impersonate another user if you’ve made your own custom chat system.[/quote]
Actually going to change my stance on this – I don’t think that impersonation is too big of a problem. As long as in the moderation logs, some extra symbol or something is added to indicate that it wasn’t a true message, impersonation shouldn’t be a huge problem. We’ll just have to not always trust the validity of screenshots.
Moderation isn’t the only possible result of impersonation. What if I offered you 500k for a game right now and you spent weeks making the game and sent it to me and then I said I didn’t offer any such thing. You would be a victim of someone impersonating me.
Impersonation is possible right now but anyone knowledgeable enough to do it is intelligent enough to not do it. If impersonation becomes as easy as calling a function then people will put it in their admin commands and suddenly everyone will be impersonating everyone.
