Today I was browsing through steam, and I noticed that games on there had custom tags, such as RPG, singleplayer Action, etc. I then came up with the idea that it could be applied and useful in roblox too. Giving creators and perhaps players the option to add custom tags to their stuff. Players will be able to search the catalog or game page based on popular tags or tags they search for.
This can benefit both the player and the creator. For the player it will be easier to find the game or clothing to their liking. The creator wont have to write a long list of âtagsâ anymore in their clothing description or clothing title.
Apart from this, at the top of the game/catalog page (or anywhere else) there can be a small list of most popular tags. This can boost certain games, and can also be transferred into a nice statistic to see what roblox players like the most.
Also I have noticed when looking in the catalog for a certain item, it can be difficult to find it. For example when I search âredâ, the first 100 pages of the catalog will be the same item dubbed âRED RED RED RED RED REDâ. This problem can be solved by the tag system, by creating a filter which doesnât allow double tags.
Issues and Solutions
Double Tags
As I previously mentioned, creators will try to make a lot of tags which are the same but just differently spelled.
E.G. red r3d RED ReD red_ xred
This can easily be solved by creating a filter for the tags which prevents these double tags and denies them.
Combining tags
Creators will try to fit multiple tags into one, changing âbeautifulâ and âcomputergamesâ into âbeautifulcomputergamesâ.
This can be fixed by adding a max length of characters to tags, so that only small useful tags can be made
false tags
Creators will make false tags. What this means for example is that they will create a tag âsummerâ for a winter themed game. This can be fixed by allowing players to vote remove tags. To prevent bots from abusing this, roblox can make a captcha check appear when a player votes for ~3 tags in a short timespan
Support, my other solution to false tags which also comes in to the solution of combining tags and Double tags. Which is to have limited amount of tags added. A bot system would be very inefficient because of this voting decision. As popular games would suffer the most as the genre tags are likely to be constantly removed and re-added.
Other than that the ideal of broadening the genre sounds promising.
I think the reason something like this hasnât been implemented is because of botting and raiding.
###Botting
A user who wants to compete with your game, or who just doesnât like it in general, may bot your tags. For instance, if the game were like Phantom Forces, the bots might tag the game as âroleplayâ which would hide it from searches and discourage users seeking an FPS from playing. Before anyone suggests ways to stop botting, itâs not easy (botters currently get past a signup captcha, verified email, IP floodcheck, and age check) and if you have to ask âWhy donât they do x simple thing?â itâs because x isnât simple and wonât solve the issue. I encourage you all to read up on past threads concerning botting if youâre looking into ways to stop it.
###Raiding
A community figure may tell their followers to tag a game a certain way, whether it be a game they donât like, or a request to tag their own game to their advantage. Groups used to be searchable by tags in their description, but almost every single one of the large groups tagged their group description with everything so theyâd get more popularity. Searching was eventually tweaked to only look at the group name because of this abuse. While the descriptions were only controlled by the group owner, they could do something similar with game/item tags by telling their members to tag them a certain way.
Catalog is still unusable, and smaller games shouldnât have to compete in searches with games that have their same title ten times in a row.
If clothing uploads required funcaptcha occasionally to upload and tag clothing and searches were based on tags and not names and descs this could save the roblox clothing marketplace
It is currently very hard to navigate through the library. It looks more like a relic of the past compared to other pages.
With the recently added access to a massive amount of copyrighted music and sounds, it is nearly impossible to find the best audio that would fit your needs. The same goes with the player made assets which are often burried under heaps of random abandoned or low quality unrelated projects.
The tag spamming can be easily fixed by having premade tags to choose from, while custom tags would have to be moderated before being visible.
I would also mention that there should be other advanced tag features similar to what other websites, especially some image boards have to offer. By this I mean the ability to search audio of a certain lower/upper length limit, images of a certain resolution or others.
Here are a few examples:
A nature based ambient sound that loops and is longer than 15 but shorter or equal to 30 seconds: nature ambient looped audio-length:>15 audio-length:<=30
A png image that is a seamless texture and is at least 200 pixels wide and 300 high and contains alpha: png seamless texture image-resolution-x:>=200 image-resolution-y:>=300 alpha
There should also be an ability to filter by full names or partial names which would act like string.find in Lua, ignoring letter case or only including exact names. Anything inside quotes will be treated as a single term. name-partial:"This will find anything that contains the exact searched text" name-partial-case_insensitive:"This will do a similar job as above but will ignore capitalization" name-full:"This will only list assets that have this name" name-full-case_insensitive:"Same as above but ignores capitalization"
As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to find specific assets in the Library (especially talking about audio).
Currently weâre only able to search using the look-up bar, or categorise things using default âpopularityâ filters.
However, this often times doesnât fetch the results youâd be looking for since itâs not very specific. right now Iâm looking for sound effects for rattling bones, but most results are songs uploaded by Roblox or otherwise irrelevant audios.
I think itâd be very nice to give pre-made tags to assets, similar to how tags work on the DevForums.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because Iâd be able to distinguish sound effects from themes and themes from ambience for example.
I support this, but if pre-made tags were added, an extra measure should be in place to prevent people (or bots) abusing it.
Often, âedgyâ people who make clothes like shirts and pants put useless tags in the description so the item appears in more searches. With pre-made tags, it would just be a further advantage to them, so what I think should happen is a maximum of tags can only be used, or captive to whatever genre the item is.
For example, if the item is in the Adventure genre, then pre-made tags such as âhikerâ or âmountainâ can be used, while permitting a maximum of only 5 pre-made tags to prevent âcatalog floodâ.
Good point!
Something I forgot to add is instead of using the search-bar for looking up tags, youâd filter them.
And then you use the search bar to look up the name of such item. I think itâd make looking up items a lot less of a hassle.
