Developer Support Email (A better alternative to info@roblox.com for developers)

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#1

Developers are the most important aspect about roblox because it is them who define what the platform is and the impression it leaves on the audience. Both fortunately and unfortunately, that comes at the cost of every player in the game knowing who you are, and more importantly, which account to hack to gain control of the game.

It is common sense that a hacker would target a more valuable account for keylogging rather than a less valuable one, and since developer accounts are the most valuable accounts on roblox, hackers try harder to dream up ways to gain access to those accounts.

My story for why we need this

Some story that shows how this can be applied
Just recently (April), my friend Hashiriya’s account was hacked. Someone used a keylogger, logged cookies, or tried some other malicious method of gaining account access. His account was hacked, and he lost R$20,000 that was on that account. That’s not the worst of it though. The hacker took 100K group funds in the group and distributed them to hundreds of accounts, making them impossible to track. After that, the hacker took control of the development group, Midnight Racing Community, with his own account and exiled Hashirya (the rightful owner). Within an hour after, roblox restored the group (not account) funds and reset hash as the owner, which was fantastic - credit where credit is due; however they missed a critical piece of the puzzle…

Hash and I asked roblox in our support ticket to restore the group to my account instead of hash’s because I knew my account was secure and I was not being keylogged. I didn’t have any extensions or any sketchy apps on my PC, so we both asked roblox to restore it to bigcrazycarboy instead. Roblox chose not to do this, and about a day later, before hash even came online, the same person took the group over again. They did the exact same thing they did the day before, except he ranked everyone as the highest rank, giving everyone ingame admin commands, and permanently destroying our datastores.

After the second offense we contacted roblox right away, but they delayed the response because it was Easter weekend, understandable, but I was not very happy with the fact that after the weekend, we still did not hear from them for another 2 days. That wasn’t fast enough; the hacker had already gained another 20K from gamepass purchases since he took over the group. This is money that comes out of our pockets as game developers, and acts as a huge incentive to move away from the game engine for good. Stuff like that is not good for team morale.

Old group: Midnight Racing Community - Roblox
New group: devGem - Roblox

Anyways yada yada yada we end up moving groups because roblox terminated the hacker’s account but didn’t restore ownership or anything, players had to reset their progress, the group lost members, hacker got a copy of our game, we have to update any links to the game we posted, we lose money (almost $400) and roblox basically did nothing but take away any small chance that the hacker would have given us the group back once he got what he wanted.

Now, if roblox prepared for this by recognizing that groups realistically have multiple owners and predicted that developer accounts would be targeted, we’d be much better off today than we are. That’s because they would have made a support line that takes higher priority than the regular info@roblox.com.

I think the bottom line of this whole post is that developers need a way to get quick help when they need it; we need to be separated from the 8-year-olds (no offense) who contact roblox support because they forgot their password or can’t figure out how to download roblox.

Edit 1: Vote for this request on the RDC Favorite Feature Requests thread please! Just leave a like on the post in the thread.
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/vote-for-your-favorite-feature-requests-at-rdc-2019/303369/69?u=bigcrazycarboy

Edit 2: moved a paragraph out of the spoiler

48 Likes
#2

How exactly would this ‘Developer Support Email’ be given out? And be ensured that only developers would use it? Would it be given to the top developers via a Roblox Message on the site, or be given to people who have access to the Developer Forums.

If this email was known to be existent to the general public. And all you needed to be was a New Member of the forums to get access to it. With the automated process on getting into the forums, that’d give non-developers a ‘reason’ to get the New Member trust-level, other then to use the forums for their intended purpose. Which a lot of people wouldn’t want.

3 Likes
#3

All good points, but it could potentially be curated by a tag given to your account through achieving a certain amount of visits on your profile, since visits are what determines publicity. Once you reach x amount of visits on group and personal games, a button appears in the left hand hamburger menu which allows you to file a “Developer Support Claim” or something along those lines to open a realtime chat with an admin. The only problem with this is that if the account gets usurped, the hacker could use that button to contact support himself (and spam it for instance)

They could also tag the email associated with your account to go into a different inbox for info@roblox.com. Similar to how Gmail filters spam, promotions, etc. or some professors filter project submissions and such, roblox could direct emails from the “whitelist” of emails into a different inbox which admins check more often.

2 Likes
#4

If I had a dollar for every unique Roblox support email address I’d have enough money to raise the DevEx rates myself. Quite a few of them never get read. I think they need more staff or something.

15 Likes
#5

I can relate to info@roblox.com being closely to useless for developers. For just a few days ago I sent an email regarding my game’s botted dislikes. All I got told was that they were “investigating” and would take “action” against the bot accounts. But this is totally useless to me, my game’s rating is still messed up, so I sent another email asking about that and got to hear I could not be “informed” about what happens with other accounts, which is totally irrelevant to my request of having my game rating corrected. So I attempted a third time, still no response.

7 Likes
#6

Yeah I’ve had an experience with bots disliking games as well. Luckily it wasn’t anything important but it’s true that this problem does exist. I think giving curated developers a better handle would work nicely.

2 Likes